Industry 4.0 in Logistics and Supply Chain Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

“Industry 4.0” is a concept that focuses on automation of system and process, digitalization, and data exchange in industries. Its goal is to achieve a smart factory to reduce lead time to respond to the customers’ demand or to unforeseen events and improve productivity in the system. Using this concept can lead to improvements in manufacturing, supply chain (SC), and logistics. The adoption of Industry 4.0 in supply chain management (SCM) is a new and critical subject with a need for more research. A few studies have started reviewing the existing works on Industry 4.0; however, they do not focus on its role in SCM. This paper presents a systematic review and synthesis of the current literature on Industry 4.0 in SCM that brings out some interesting findings, which will be helpful for the academic and industry, especially top managers. This work identifies three categories from the content of the papers as exploratory vs. confirmatory, qualitative vs. quantitative, management level vs. process/technology level. Additionally, based on the Topic Modeling (TM) technique, three different clusters of Supply Chain, Logistics and Manufacturing topics were extracted. Current shortcomings, challenges, and future research directions are discussed in the conclusion.