Surveying the sense of urgency of the tactical-level management to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies: Ranking of three sister plants based on BWM-CRITIC-TOPSIS

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.