Sustainable industry 4.0 – an exploratory study for uncovering the drivers for integration

Abstract

Purpose

The concept of sustainable manufacturing has been adopted by manufacturing organizations to develop eco-friendlier products and processes. In recent times, industries are progressing toward Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Guided with smart intelligent devices, I4.0 can possibly decrease excess production, material movement and consumption of energy. If so, it is hypothesized that there is a good synergy between I4.0 and sustainability, which warrants an integrated approach for implementation. This amalgamation is termed as “Sustainable industry 4.0.” Hence, this paper aims to systematically identify and analyze the drivers for this integration.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents the analysis of 20 drivers identified from literature review for simultaneous deployment of I4.0 and sustainable manufacturing. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is used to derive the structural model for analyzing the causal association between drivers. Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) analysis is being performed to group the drivers.

Findings

The results showed that the dominant drivers derived are societal pressure and public awareness (D18), government policies on support I4.0 (D12), top management involvement and support (D15) and government promotions and regulations (D16). Also, the MICMAC analysis revealed many driving, dependent, linkage and autonomous drivers.

Research limitations/implications

The opinion from experts with combined expertise on I4.0 and sustainability was obtained. The respondent size could be increased in future studies.

Practical implications

The study has been done based on inputs from industry practitioners. Managerial and practical implications are presented. ISM shows that the drivers for deploying sustainable I4.0 are highly inter-related. It also reveals the pre-requisites for each level of the drivers.

Originality/value

The idea of analyzing the drivers for sustainable I4.0 is the original contribution of the authors.

Citation

Harikannan, N., Vinodh, S. and Gurumurthy, A. (2021), "Sustainable industry 4.0 – an exploratory study for uncovering the drivers for integration", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 357-376. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-11-2019-0269