The emergence of new technologies is providing new ways to compete in the current context of changeable and unpredictable market requirements. The focus of this paper is on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), as one of the most promising transformative technological concept of such a context, thus considered by literature as the building blocks of future smart factories. However, CPSs are still in their conceptualization phase. To this end, much literature effort has been put on their technological characterization, while there is a lack of knowledge on operations management characterization to manage such new systems. To contribute in this latter direction, this paper reviews literature in order to distinguish between technological characteristics of CPSs and operations management characteristics to build future CPS-based smart factories. This paper remarks the need for research on operations management characteristics as these may be the ones actually leading operations managers to the concrete implementation of CPS-based factories in manufacturing.

Nowadays, manufacturing firms are dealing with the unpredictability of market requirements and the frequent changes induced by technological innovation. For this reason, firms are more and more addressing the need to be responsive at an affordable cost. To do so, they are required to develop a capability called reconfigurability. This paper is a review of the existing literature because the current need makes interesting to reflect on the state of the art of reconfigurability as a concept. This reflection has led to focus on reconfigurability characteristics for both their relevance and their relationships with managerial decisions in manufacturing. To this end, a framework has been proposed. It is based on system lifecycle and production levels. These two elements have been deduced from literature and identified as relevant dimensions for decision making.

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Reconfigurable manufacturing, providing capacity and functionality on demand, is an ever more important factor of competitiveness in volatile, unpredictable , and rapidly changing markets. In this regard, scalability and convertibil-ity are considered particularly relevant characteristics, as they directly reduce re-configuration effort and enhance system responsiveness. However, in previous research, scalability and convertibility have predominately been addressed conceptually on a high level of abstraction with only limited consideration of how specific manufacturing elements can enhance and realize them. Therefore, the objective of this paper is first to identify and classify elements enabling scalability and convertibility in order to bring reconfigurability-related concepts closer to the world of practitioners. Moreover, as a result, the paper concretizes scalability and convertibility and provides a foundation for future empirical research on recon-figurability.

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