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This paper aims to identify the basis of the technological anxiety phenomenon by defining the differences and similarities in terms of barriers of the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies across industrial processing sector.

This paper presents a qualitative, exploratory research, and the authors apply the cross-case study method. The study is based on interviews with representatives of 11 medium-sized and large companies from industrial processing sector; specifically, the authors focus on three industries: automotive, food and furniture.

The research showed that there are similarities as well as differences in terms of identified barriers between individual industries. Taking into account the various dimensions of technological anxiety, similarities are visible, in particular, in the case of Internal processes and infrastructure and human resources, while in the other two dimensions, i.e. strategic planning and standards and security, differences between the sectors were noted.

The developed list of barriers can be a starting point for middle and senior managers of manufacturing companies to understand the sources of technological anxiety. The planning and introducing preventive and protective tools during Industry 4.0 implementation may reduce the occurrence of technological anxiety and thus ensure a smoother adoption of technologies 4.0, while respecting the organizational culture.

This work contributes to in-depth understanding of multifaced technological anxiety phenomenon. This paper classifies dimensions of existing barriers, increases the awareness on the difficulties during transformation process and, thus enables the improvement of the use of company’s internal potential.

In the process of industrial growth, when existing industries go for technology upgradation and new modernised industries emerge, both capital intensity and energy demand of overall industry tend to rise steadily. This poses a serious challenge for sustainable development objectives. Towards this end, enhancing energy efficiency of individual industries is the only remedy. Against this backdrop, the study aims to probe the trends in capital intensities and energy efficiencies of individual industries in India.

This study uses panel data regression analysis on data of two-digit industries from 1980/1981–2016/2017. The statistical analysis includes relevant macroeconomic variables derived from the literature to ascertain the drivers of energy efficiency in industries.

The results brought out that capital deepening due to technology upgradation and modernisation and capital productivity growth are the decisive determinants of energy efficiency growth. Furthermore, the ever-increasing fuel price motivated industries to conserve energy on a steady basis, supplemented by energy conservation-specific policy interventions.

This study recommends policy initiatives to ascertain and address technology gaps industry-wise, so that its subsequent efficient capital utilisation, and energy conservation measures of industries would result in energy efficiency growth in industry. The policy must focus on energy-efficient capital intensification in fabricated metals, leather, textile and wood industries that are found less-energy-efficient despite being less-capital-intensive.

This study empirically explores the capital efficiency of industries by investigating the interaction between capital intensity and energy efficiency at a two-digit industry level. It explores the determinants of energy efficiency and proposes industry-specific policies for energy-efficiency-enhancement of the overall industry.

Rosewood, as the most internationally traded endangered species, is subject to a series of restrictive trade policies globally. China has historically been the largest importer of rosewood in the world. The fluctuation of China’s rosewood import prices will have a profound impact on the global rosewood trade pattern. This study, therefore, assessed the impact of restrictive trade policies on China’s rosewood import prices to explore the fluctuation rule of rosewood trade prices under restrictive policies.

The study built a partial equilibrium framework about the formation mechanism of rosewood import price bubbles under supply constraints. On this basis, with China’s daily import prices of major rosewood species, the generalized supremum augmented Dickey–Fuller (GSADF) and backward supremum augmented Dickey–Fuller (BSADF) tests were applied to explore the effect of restrictive trade policies on China’s rosewood import prices.

The empirical analysis revealed that there were multiple price bubbles for five of the seven rosewood species. The largest bubbles were always created before and after the deployment of supply constraints. The empirical results for the counterfactual examples implied that price bubbles would not have occurred if restrictive rosewood trade policies had not been implemented. The above findings indicated that these measures tended to trigger significant price bubbles in China’s rosewood imports.

The effect of restrictive rosewood trade policies on rosewood trade prices had not yet been explored in previous research studies. This study empirically analyzed the effect of restrictive trade policies on China’s rosewood import prices using econometric models.

While firms in developing countries are increasingly adopting lean practices of inventory management, there is limited evidence showing the impact of lean practices on firm performance in countries such as India. Lean practices improve the financial performance of the firms through superior cost-reduction measures and operational efficiencies. This paper examines the impact of inventory leanness in Indian manufacturing firms on their financial performance.

The authors measure inventory leanness based on stochastic frontier analysis (SLA), apart from using conventional measures available in the literature. The authors analyze the impact of inventory leanness on the financial performance of firms by examining data for 12,334 unique Indian manufacturing firms for the period 2009–2018. The authors present a comparative analysis using different methods of inventory leanness and study the effects on firm performance.

First, the authors find that only 68 industries out of 411 industries follow lean practices, i.e. most industries do not follow lean practices. Second, the estimation results show that there exists a positive relationship between inventory leanness and firm performance. The results suggest that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between inventory leanness and firm performance for the entire sample. In particular, 17% of the industries in the sample exhibit such a relationship, and it is sufficiently strong to show up in the average regression results for the entire sample.

The authors introduce a novel measure of inventory leanness named stochastic frontier leanness based on the SFA method used in production economics. It measures leanness by benchmarking the inventory levels against the industry “frontier”. Furthermore, the authors conduct an empirical study of the lean-financial performance relationship with a large panel dataset of Indian firms instead of the survey-based methods that were previously used in the literature.

Quality 4.0 represents the integration of quality management principles with digital technologies to drive continuous improvement and innovation in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the essential organizational variables (OVs) for the successful implementation of Quality 4.0 in the Indian furniture industry.

Through a broad literature review, data from the Indian furniture industry and experts’ judgments a list of nineteen OVs have been recognized and classified into four major categories of digitalization, design, continuous improvement and employee training and up-skilling. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been used to give comparative importance and prioritize the identified nineteen OVs of Quality 4.0 in the context of the Indian furniture industry.

The results of this study reveal that the identified variables are very important for successful Quality 4.0 implementation and have been supported by empirical evidence from the Indian furniture industry. The variable “automation” under the digitalization-related category is a significant variable having a maximum weightage of 26.8% followed by Cloud computing (DI4) having a global weight of 12.8%.

In addition to offering valuable insights and practical recommendations, the study recognizes a few limitations, such as industry-specific and the limited sample size. To diminish these limitations, future research should believe in conducting similar studies in different industries and extend the scope of the study.

Quality 4.0 is a term that refers to the integration of advanced digital technologies and smart data analytics into quality management systems to implement it considering OVs.

This article aims to analyze the strategic work of Polish entrepreneurs in the furniture industry following the political changes in 1989. The authors examined how these entrepreneurs transitioned from local craftsmen or importers into leaders of international manufacturing companies and how their strategizing contributed to the unprecedented growth of the Polish furniture sector.

The authors examined extant data, specifically biographical interviews conducted with 11 prominent leaders in the Polish furniture industry (Hryniewicki, 2015, 2018). They analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates J.C. Spender’s theory of strategic management with Barry Johnson’s concept of polarity management. Polarity is a way of understanding and managing interdependent, opposing pairs of values or perspectives that give rise to conflict.

The analysis reveals key patterns of strategic challenges at the level of human agency, history and sense-making. The authors identified four key polarities: life and business, knowledge presence and absence, concordance and discordance, and instrumental and non-instrumental sense-making.

The polarity concept illuminates the interplay of agency and determinism in strategic decision-making, offering valuable insights for methodology and a deeper understanding of Poland’s furniture industry.

This article aims to explore the potential of augmented reality (AR) to enhance the customer shopping experience in the furniture industry. It aims to investigate how AR mobile apps can be used to provide a hedonic and utilitarian shopping experience for customers.

W administered an online questionnaire to 180 customers of the company “Cubitte Concept” (www.cubitteconcept.com), which specializes in the manufacture and design of furniture. This company allowed us to contact these customers to disseminate the questionnaire for gathering relevant information. Data collection lasted approximately three months, from July 3rd to October 5th, 2023, yielding 150 valid responses, which represented 85% of all collected questionnaires. The small sample size is justified by the problem of access to our target group, who are reluctant to be questioned in any way and try at all costs to protect their opinions and privacy. The following table describes the main characteristics of the sample.

The results indicate that customer experience, with its three hedonic, cognitive and utilitarian dimensions – along with interactivity, performance expectancy and effort expectancy – have a significant impact on purchase intention.

The limitations of this investigation may open up future avenues of research where we can further explore the impact of AR technology on customer experience and purchase intention in other sectors, as well as study the moderating effects individual, social and cultural factors.

While the practical implications can help retailers develop effective strategies for integrating AR into their online shopping experiences. By understanding the potential benefits and challenges associated with AR, retailers can make informed decisions about its implementation and design effective AR applications that improve customer engagement and satisfaction. Therefore, these findings present an opportunity for a comprehensive understanding of how AR influences consumer behavior, empowering stakeholders to refine and optimize their AR marketing strategies. Notably, in Tunisia, AR usage is commonplace in the furniture industry. However, based on this study’s insights, we advocate for broader adoption and integration of AR across diverse sectors, including education, tourism, ready-to-wear and beyond.

This study presents a unique and novel analysis of AR in the furniture industry and contributes to the current understanding of the use of technology to enhance the customer experience and provide recommendations to professionals looking to implement augmented reality in their marketing strategy.

This study is focused to support an ongoing development project of the case company's current state and the challenges of the order-to-cash (O2C) process. The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer, and therefore, its punctual and fluent order management is vital. It is observed that the high degree of manual work in the O2C process causes mistakes, delays and rework in the process. The purpose of this article is therefore to analyze the case company's current state of the O2C process as well as to identify the areas of development in this process by deploying the means of Lean Six Sigma tools such as value stream mapping (VSM).

The study was conducted as a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative data, a workshop on VSM was organized to analyze the current state of the O2C process of a case company, engaged in the energy and environment sector in Finland.

The results found that excessive manual work was highly connected to inadequate or incorrect data in pricing and invoicing activities, which resulted in canceled invoices. Canceled invoices are visible to the customer and have a negative impact on the customer experience. This study found that by improving the performance of the O2C process activities and improving communication among the internal and external stakeholders, the whole O2C process can perform more effectively and provide better customer value.

The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer and therefore its punctual and fluent order management is vital. To ensure that the O2C process is operating as desired, suitable process performance metrics need to be aligned and followed. The results gathered from the case company's data, questionnaire interviews, and the VSM workshop are all highlighted in this study. The main practical and managerial implications were to understand the real-time O2C process performance, which is necessary to ensure strong performance and enhance continuous improvement of the O2C process that leads to operational excellence and commercial competitiveness of the studied case company.

There is a strong consensus among scholars that the international competitiveness of companies strongly depends on the support of institutions, which reduces uncertainty in transactions by giving form to economic interactions, while less attention was paid to the role of international standards within this context. This study intends to propose its contribution by deepening the role of process certifications in the competitiveness and internationalization strategies of companies, with specific reference to the wood-furniture sector.

Data were collected using a questionnaire survey distributed via computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI) methodology and sent to a sample of 2,845 Italian companies which operate in the wood-furniture industry, using simple random sampling. Thanks to the survey administration, 228 companies participated to the survey.

The study shows that it is companies operating in international markets that define this tool as relevant; this underlines how certification is seen as a kind of business card for entering international markets. In this context, the role of business leadership emerges as fundamental in the practical definition of the objectives to be set by adopting a quality management systems and in the subsequent commitment to obtain them.

Up to now, the literature has taken these elements into analysis mainly considering the consumers' perspective. In sectors with a higher content of innovation, technology and design, such as the wood-furniture sector, the literature appears to be poor in terms of contributions.

This study aims to explore and theorize value gaps within value chain management (VCM) by extending the service quality gap model to the context of global manufacturing value chains.

Drawing upon a case study of a small, family-owned Swedish furniture wholesaler, Alpha, this research adapts the service quality gap model and integrates it into the VCM framework. The investigation examines the value creation and delivery processes across a network of actors, highlighting how various gaps emerge at different stages of the value chain.

The study identifies and describes several value gaps, including those related to consumer understanding, manufacturing capabilities and coordination across the value chain. Value creation gaps arise from poor communication about consumer needs and product features, whereas value delivery gaps are mainly tied to manufacturing capacity and material restrictions. These gaps can result in misalignment between consumer expectations and the delivered value.

Although this study provides insights into the emergence of value gaps, further research is needed to determine the magnitude and reduction strategies for these gaps. In addition, understanding how consumers evaluate new products remains a critical area for investigation.

The research highlights the significance of a coordinated approach to managing value creation and delivery processes. It underscores the need for companies to capture accurate consumer data, consider manufacturing capabilities and engage in effective coordination with various actors in the value chain.

By addressing value gaps, companies can enhance consumer satisfaction and minimize potential dissatisfaction caused by misalignment between consumer expectations and delivered value. This, in turn, can lead to improved relationships with consumers and other actors within the value chain.

This research offers a novel perspective on value gaps in VCM, extending the service quality gap model to the realm of manufacturing. It underscores the importance of managing both value creation and delivery processes for enhancing competitive advantage in a global market.