Implementation and Performance of Industry 4.0 Technologies in Logistics and Supply Chain Management: A Review of the Effects of Contingencies

Abstract

During the last decade, the 4th Industrial Revolution (4.0 IR) has attracted significant attention from both researchers and practitioners. The emergence of new 4.0 IR technologies promoted more investment in their adoption but at the same time raised more challenges to managers in identifying the actual implications of these technologies on organization performance. At the same time, empirical work on the relationship between 4.0 IR implementation and performance has reported mixed findings, and some recent studies suggest that researchers need to focus on exploring specific conditions that enable organizations to effectively translate their investment in developing 4.0 IR tools into positive performance. This paper argues that these inconclusive findings are partially caused by the lack of considering the contingency effects of other factors while examining these relations by previous empirical research and it explores the extent to which existing research has considered these contingency effects. Using the contingency theory of the firm, the above theoretical belief is theoretically discussed and established using outcomes reported by several empirical studies. The findings of this study provide several theoretical and practical implications and additional insights into the theory and practice of 4.0 IR in the logistics and supply chain management domain in particular.