Abstract

     Companies require a greater understanding of the Supply Chain (SC) benefits that can be gained from industry 4.0 (I4.0) and, more specifically, which technologies and concepts that can improve certain SC performance measures. A state-of-the-art systematic literature review (SLR) has been done on supply chain performance measurement linked with various industry 4.0 technologies. Based on the findings of the review through content analysis, this paper presents a framework for exploring the usage of I4.0 technologies to identify the potential supply chain performance measures. This framework includes the dimensions of Procurement 4.0, Manufacturing 4.0, Logistics 4.0, and Warehousing 4.0. As a scientific contribution, this study has validated the proposed framework through case studies, where the existing studies are limited. Finally, several fruitful future possible extensions have been discussed based on the proposed framework.

Introduction

     First, the development of steam engines changed the production processes. Combustion engines and the innovative assembly line introduced by Henry Ford then initiated the second industrial revolution. The third industrial revolution was characterized by the automation of production processes (Kuznaz et al., 2015). Today, increasing globalization and competition has led to the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Evolution also known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0). I4.0 was first introduced in Germany at the Hannover Messe in 2011, as “a completely automated and intelligent production project, capable of communicating autonomously with the main corporate players relying on the horizontal and vertical integration of production systems driven by real-time data interchange and flexible manufacturing to further enable customized production” (Piccarozzi & Aquilani, 2018). This new combination of manufacturing and information technologies has brought a whole new perspective to the industry on how manufacturing can collaborate with new technologies to get maximum output with minimum resource utilization (Kamble et al., 2018, Gorecki et al., 2020, Bag et al., 2021a, Bag et al., 2021b).

     I4.0 is not limited to the internal value chain of a company; it attempts to advance the SC management (SCM) “which covers the entire series of manufacturing industry operations from product design to sales and maintenance in order to enable mass-customization” (Asakura, 2016). With the goal of understanding how I4.0 technologies and concepts can improve SC performance (Schniederjans et al., 2020, Fatorachian and Kazemi, 2021), this work presents the development of a framework based on the findings of a systematic literature review of I4.0 technologies, concepts, and SC performance measures. During the systematic literature review, a sample of papers are selected and used in a descriptive and thematic analysis. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art key technologies and concepts within I4.0 in relation to SC performance are identified and listed. The findings from the literature review serve as a basis for creating the framework to relate the identified technologies and concepts to the identified SC performance measures.

Conclusion

     As I4.0 is emerging, this work sheds light on the technologies and concepts of I4.0. From previous literature reviews, it became clear that there was a lack of reviews on the impact of I4.0 on SC performance. To address this concern, this work is aimed at exploring the current state of the art within the technologies and concepts of I4.0 through an SLR on selected publications by using the 8-step method proposed by Denyer & Pilbeam (2013). 832 articles were narrowed down to 137 articles, and those were thoroughly analyzed. The lack of literature reviews on I4.0 and SC performance was apparent, so this work contributes to the literature with an SLR in the field of I4.0 and SC performance. The result of the descriptive analysis indicates that the interest of I4.0 is growing with an increase in the number of publications over the past seven years. From the descriptive findings it appears that 14 technologies and concepts, such as IoT, CC, AM, BDA, Industrial Robotics, DT, horizontal and vertical integration, among others contribute to a new paradigm in SC. The thematic findings describe all the identified technologies and concepts and their effect on SC performance. The identified I4.0 technologies and concepts provide merely a holistic view of the most common technologies and concepts and their impact on SC performance. The identified I4.0 technologies and concepts were then divided into four clusters: physical/digital interface technologies; network technologies; data processing technologies; and physical/digital process technologies. These divisions are determined by whether their network connectivity is extended or limited, and it explores how many of the technological elements are either software or hardware. Based on the four technology clusters and SC performance benefits found in the SLR, combined with a validation from the industry, an I4.0 and SC performance framework is proposed. The validation of the findings from the SLR was done by ten companies from Danish industries working with I4.0. The companies assessed the impact of the 13 out of the 14 identified technologies and concepts on the potential benefits found in the literature by giving them a score from 0 to 5; these results were used to finalize the framework. The 14th technology, cybersecurity, was not considered, since it does not have a direct impact on SC performance. The proposed framework identifies the impact of different I4.0 technologies and concepts on SC performance and serves as one of the initial efforts to contribute to the theory of I4.0 and the relationships between technologies, concepts, and SC performance improvement.