Kaizen 4.0 in SMEs: A Brief Systematic Literature Review on Digital Transformation and Continuous Improvement Processes

The adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies and the implementation of continuous improvement methodologies represent two strands of production management that have historically evolved along separate paths, yet increasingly converge in the scientific literature. This convergence unfolds within a broader process of technological integration, whereby the 4.0 paradigm is absorbed into more traditional management approaches such as Kaizen and Lean Manufacturing. Such integration is particularly consequential for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the productive backbone of most developing economies, for which supporting digital transformation is essential given their weight in employment and value generation. Against this backdrop, this paper presents a brief review, following the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology, aimed at mapping the state of the art on the relationship between the Kaizen approach — together with its associated tools (Lean Manufacturing, PDCA, Six Sigma, Just-in-Time) — and the uptake of 4.0 enabling technologies in the production and service environments of SMEs. Drawing on the Web of Science and Scopus databases, a search strategy was built combining terms from both fields with linguistic variants and synonyms (Smart Manufacturing, Digital Transformation, Lean 4.0, among others), applying exclusion criteria based on duplication, thematic relevance, and minimum metadata availability. The resulting sample was classified by document type, relevance to the guiding research questions, and five thematic axes, including its link to the Industry 5.0 paradigm, which repositions organisational resilience and sustainability as core design criteria for production systems. Preliminary results reveal a growing interest within the scientific community, with concrete examples of the joint application of both approaches in production and service settings, while also pointing to a broad disciplinary field that remains largely unexplored, particularly regarding implementation in SMEs. This paper marks the starting point of a full-length article currently under development.