Challenges of Industry 4.0 for production enterprises functioning within cyber industry networks

The globalization process and the marginalization of Europe in world production prompted the German economy to implement the Industry 4.0 concept called the fourth industrial revolution. As a part of the proposed concept, a close connection of physical objects with the information network should be made. Enterprises will connect by intelligent resources communicating through the modern Internet of Things technologies, big data, and cloud computing. Therefore modern enterprises have a new further challenge which means a need to build and cooperate within cyber-physical systems. The aim of the article is to present key challenges for Polish small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises oriented to the cooperation within the Industry 4.0 concept. Furthermore, the results of surveys conducted on a selected group of Polish production companies in the metal sector are shown. These results present the condition of Polish enterprises, their concerns and expectations regarding the implementation of the Industry 4.0 concept. The paper contains also the new idea to create the Cyber Industry Network (CIN) which means a kind of the on-line available platform for exchanging production capacity of small and medium enterprises and allows for the efficient combining of free resources to realize joint production projects.