Over the past decade, the applications of drone technology have proliferated in various industries. This dissertation sets out to investigate the opportunities and challenges of drones in manufacturing industries from an operations management (OM) perspective. This dissertation consists of four papers. The first paper explores the applications of drones in manufacturing and proposes a typology of drone applications. The second paper narrows down the scope to examine potential applications and the benefits and challenges involved in the petrochemical industry that has shown particularly high potentials for the use of drones. The third paper focuses on the adoption process of drones in Geberit and IKEA and highlights where, why, and how drones can be used in operations settings. The fourth paper builds a virtual simulation model and explores the potential of automatic drones in factory inspection operations.This dissertation contributes to the existing literature on advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) by introducing the new case of drones. This dissertation has rich contributions to practice. First, it provides a systematic approach to identifying drone applications, benefits, and challenges in manufacturing settings and provides a useful starting point for companies evaluating the adoption of drone technology in their factories by elucidating the factors that should be known and planned before implementation. This dissertation benefits from both explorative and experimental research approaches. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this dissertation offers one of the first systematic and rigorous analyses on drone technology from an OM perspective.

Keywords
Drones, Operations Management, Technology Management, Industry 4.0, and Manufacturing.