What Drives the Implementation of Industry 4.0? The Role of Opportunities and Challenges in the Context of Sustainability

By Julian Marius Müller, Daniel Kiel, Kai-Ingo Voigt. 2018

902 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The implementation of Industry 4.0 has a far-reaching impact on industrial value creation. Studies on its opportunities and challenges for companies are still scarce. However, the high practical and theoretical relevance of digital and connected manufacturing technologies implies that it is essential to understand the underlying dynamics of their implementation. Thus, this study examines the relevance of Industry 4.0-related opportunities and challenges as drivers for Industry 4.0 implementation in the context of sustainability, taking a differentiated perspective on varying company sizes, industry sectors, and the company’s role as an Industry 4.0 provider or user. A research model comprising relevant Industry 4.0-related opportunities and challenges as antecedents for its implementation is hypothesized. In order to test the model, partial least square structural equation modeling is applied for a sample of 746 German manufacturing companies from five industry sectors. The results show that strategic, operational, as well as environmental and social opportunities are positive drivers of Industry 4.0 implementation, whereas challenges with regard to competitiveness and future viability as well as organizational and production fit impede its progress. Moreover, it is shown that the perception of Industry 4.0-related opportunities and challenges as antecedents to Industry 4.0 implementation depends on different company characteristics.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c85e08c9354c9de58048edc1bc107b133ce73c1b

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Citations in the corpus

The Healthcare Sustainable Supply Chain 4.0: The Circular Economy Transition Conceptual Framework with the Corporate Social Responsibility Mirror (2019, background): “The integration between the IoT and the IoS creates value through the disruption, providing a new paradigm, and supports the conceptual change of the production chain, that is, through the insertion of the digital technologies in the supply chain [73].”
Industry 4.0: A Bibliometric Review of Its Managerial Intellectual Structure and Potential Evolution in the Service Industries (2019, methodology): “Moreover, some studies emphasize the sustainability aspects of the implementation of the industry 4.0 ecosystem (Kiel et al., 2017b; Müller et al., 2018b; Yang et al., 2017)—this topic overlaps between community 1 and 2 and, apparently, links them together.”
Sustainable manufacturing in Industry 4.0: an emerging research agenda (2019, methodology): “…in Industry 4.0 are being more developed in the context of vertical and horizontal integration and business models’ development, for example, the variables of context and content identiﬁed in Müller, Kiel, and Voigt (2018): • Context (Why): competitiveness; ﬂexibility; quality; and, efﬁciency.”