Abstract
Purpose: Although the decision to adopt Industry 4.0 is commonly strategical, the selection and implementation of technology are the responsibilities of the tactical level management. The tactical level management will also directly experience the impact of adopting the technology towards the organizational performances in their functional areas. The comparative survey study aims to measure the tactical level management’s sense of urgency of the nine pillars in three plants of a single manufacturing organization.Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology starts with a literature review to collect the criteria appertaining to the pillars. Based on the 95 constituting criteria, the second step prepares and conducts a questionnaire survey with 32 participants on three sister plants. Next, rough BWM-CRITIC-TOPSIS ranks these plants at the pillar and criteria levels. The ranking method integrates Best-Worst Method (BWM), Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC), and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The top management discussed and rendered insights into the results.Findings: Results show that the high-mix and labor-intensive plant (Plant 1) has the highest urgency, whereas the largely automated plant (Plant 3) has the lowest urgency to adopt the nine pillars. The findings provide empirical evidence of the effect of the recent Industry 4.0 awareness programs in Plant 1 and advanced infrastructure would lead to organization inertia (Plant 3) to aggressively pursue technological change. The most urgent pillar is cybersecurity, and the least urgent pillar is additive manufacturing (AM), outlining the concern over cyber threats when product information is increasingly integrated into the supply chain and technology immaturity of AM in production.Research limitations/implications: A limitation of this study is that the comparative survey only focused on three plants and the tactical level management of an organization.Originality/value: This study contributes to the knowledge of Industry 4.0 readiness by being the first to show different levels in the sense of urgency of the tactical level managements on the relevant technologies, which potentially affect the direction and the pace of Industry 4.0 adoption.
Highlights
The essence of Industry 4.0 is to take advantage of digitization to achieve improvements in terms of automation and operational efficiency, including effectiveness (Ślusarczyk, 2018)
The findings provided empirical evidence that advanced infrastructure would lead to organization inertia to further aggressively pursue technological change
To cater for varying knowledge and judgment of participants to certain pillars and criteria, the rough Best-Worst Method (BWM)-Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC)-TOPSIS method which considered objective and subjective weights in the analysis was used to rank the plants based on the urgency to adopt a particular technology
Summary
The essence of Industry 4.0 is to take advantage of digitization to achieve improvements in terms of automation and operational efficiency, including effectiveness (Ślusarczyk, 2018). Various research initiatives examine and assess different aspects of Industry 4.0 adoption in organizations Such initiatives include Reference Architectural Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) (Hankel & Rexroth, 2015), digital maturity and transformation study (Back & Berghaus, 2016), Industry 4.0 component model (Hoffmeister, Festo & Co, 2015), Roadmap Industry 4.0 (Pessl, Sorko & Mayer, 2017), Acatech Industry 4.0 Maturity Index (Schuh, Anderl, Gausemeier, ten Hompel & Wahlster, 2017), SPICE-based Industry 4.0-MM (Gökalp, Şener & Eren, 2017), Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI) (Singapore EDB, 2018), Industry 4.0 readiness assessment tool (Agca, Gibson, Godsell, Ignatius, Davies, C., & Xu, 2017), and ‘Pathfinder 4.0’ (Intechcentras, 2019). Managers with a sense of urgency would listen and communicate the vision with their subordinates
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