Towards understanding the impact of industry 4.0 technologies on operational performance: an empirical investigation in the US and EU automotive industry

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR - Industry 4.0) is an emerging and revolutionary step transforming the overall manufacturing industry business model. Over the past decade, 4IR is witnessing increasing attention by both scholars and practitioners due to its ability to achieve high competitiveness growth and innovation. The adoption of 4IR technologies (I4T) can tremendously improve the operational performance of any industry and it can solve many difficulties linked to the production process, the provision of services, and the overall supply chain. In this context, a pilot study was carried out in the automotive industry where managers from 51 US and EU firms were interviewed to investigate the 4IR technologies adopted within their manufacturing practices. The aim of the current study is to examine the most utilized 4IR solutions among 16 key technologies and then to tackle the correlations between those and multiple operational performance metrics (OPMs). Findings showed that more than 80% of the respondents were implementing multiple 4IR technologies at a time. The latter was found to be significantly correlated with the studied OPMs. The technologies that mostly improve quality were Cloud Computing (p