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Received: 24 March 2020 Accepted: 19 May 2020 With the constant increase in energy costs and their impacts on environmental policies, optimizing production and reducing operating costs is considered a critical tactic for companies to remain globally competitive. In the height of the Industry 4.0 era, the need to digitize and automate manufacturing processes emerges as another predominant goal. The difficulty lies in understanding how thermodynamic laws can enhance energy efficiency and support for the strategies to approach the transformation into a smart factory. To this end, LCA is the most used tool that helps to measure the consumption of resources throughout the entire life cycle of the process. The Exergetic Analysis (EA) adds information on the efficiency. The goal of this work is to show that hybridizing LCA with EA brings significant advantages: it makes the outcomes of the assessment more objective and it helps to develop retrofitting solution, thus enabling the process to automatically prevent any machine failures. In line with the Industry 4.0, any company would be able to select appropriate sensing infrastructure to enhance its monitoring and management system and redesign it, making it smarter. An illustrative case study on an Italian SME’s manufacturing process will be addressed in this paper.

Benchmarking Sustainability on an Industrial Case Within Industry 4.0 Paradigm: Advantages of Involving Exergetic Analysis in Life Cycle Thinking