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Cite this paper as:
Margherita E.G., Braccini A.M. (2020) Organizational
Impacts on Sustainability of Industry 4.0: A Systematic
Literature Review from Empirical Case Studies. In: Agrifoglio
R., Lamboglia R., Mancini D., Ricciardi F. (eds) Digital
Business Transformation. Lecture Notes in Information
Systems and Organisation, vol 38. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47355-6_12
2
Organizational Impacts on Sustainability of Industry 4.0:
A systematic literature review from empirical case studies
Emanuele Gabriel Margherita1 and Alessio Maria Braccini1
1 University of Tuscia, Department of Economics Engineering Society and Organization –
DEIM, Via del Paradiso, 47, 01100, Viterbo, Italy
emargherita@unitus.it
Abstract. There is an increasing interest in Industry 4.0 (I40) applications for
organizations to act sustainable. Indeed literature agrees the adoption of I40 tech-
nologies promises various organizational benefits which lead to the achievement
of an enduring sustainability and competitive advantage for organizations. How-
ever, there is a lack of a study which provides transparency confirming and sum-
marizing those spawned organizational benefits. This paper aims at addressing
this gap performing a systematic literature review analyzing I40 empirical case
studies for detecting the spawned I40 organizational impacts on sustainability.
We employed the triple bottom line (TBL) concept as sensitive device to confront
different studies distinguishing among the sustainability dimension, namely the
economic, social and environmental dimension. We then categorize and group
I40 organizational impacts according to TBL dimensions. The review portrays
an initial empirical knowledge regarding the I40 organizational impacts on sus-
tainability since 18 I40 empirical case study have found. Furthermore, the litera-
ture review reveals that I40 applications mainly impact the economic dimension
whereas few applications generated benefits for the remaining dimensions.
Keywords: industry 4.0, organizational impacts, organizational benefits, sus-
tainability, internet of things, literature review, cyber physical system
3
1 Introduction
Nowadays due to the climate change and a constant increasing of pollution, acting sus-
tainable has become the requirement and priority for organizations [22].
Within this landscape, Industry 4.0 (henceforth I40) is a trendy industrial initiative
which aims at innovating production processes towards sustainable practices through
the use of advanced digital technologies into the assembly line [13, 19]. However, even
though there is a consensus in literature that I40 leads to positive organizational impacts
on sustainability [13, 19], there is a lack of studies that provide transparency summa-
rizing and confirming these premises [28]. To address this gap, we perform a systematic
literature review of I40 empirical case study detecting the I40 organizational impacts
on sustainability. We use the Triple Bottom Line (henceforth TBL) concept as sensitive
device since it allows to study the sustainability in a holistic way embracing the eco-
nomic, environmental and social dimensions [12]. Therefore, we detected I40 organi-
zational impacts which affected positively the three dimensions. Our investigation an-
swers the following questions: “What are the organizational impacts on sustainability
of Industry 4.0?”
The reminder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the founda-
tional concepts of I40 and TBL. Section 3 illustrates the research method. Section 4 is
devoted to the results of the literature review. Section 5 discusses the findings proposing
future directions for the research. The paper concludes in Section 6 proposing implica-
tions for researchers and practitioners.
2 Related Literature
In this section, we portray the Triple Bottom Line, I40 initiative, the related technolo-
gies and their organizational impacts on sustainability.
2.1 The Triple Bottom Line
Developed by Elkington, the TBL describes sustainability in a holistic way. The
TBL encompasses three dimensions: environmental, social, and economic [12, 14].
TBL supports organizations to address sustainability issues providing accounting
measures for all the dimensions.
Indeed, the environmental dimension refers to organizational practices which ac-
count the currently environmental issues like ozone depletion and climate change. More
specific, this dimension embraces practices which avoid consuming natural resources
as well as practices for alleviating CO2 and polluted gas emissions. Moreover, this di-
mension encourages practices dedicated to the recycling of resources, the regeneration
and purification of resources, as well as redesigning of processes and products to min-
imize resource usage, in terms of raw materials, water, and energy that even alleviate
the pollution issue [14, 17].
The social dimension refers to organizational attitude to treat and develop people as
a capital within the organization for creating value. As such, this dimension considers
4
as main driver the enrichment of work tasks and a more suitable and safer workplace
which also are the means to improve the quality of life and society [14, 29].
Lastly, the economic dimension refers to organizational attitude to make profit as
well as protecting the other two dimensions. More specific, the economic dimension of
the TBL is related to with economic and financial performance dimensions of the or-
ganization. In addition, organization supports both long-term economic growth and the
community growth encouraging the increasing of the personal income, paying taxes
and promoting actions in order to support the other two dimensions [14, 34]
Finally, Figure 1 punctuated the organizational impacts that TBL embraces for each
dimension which we employed as a sensitive device for detecting organizational im-
pacts on sustainability.
Figure 1.The TBL Organizational Impacts [14]
2.2 Industry 4.0
I40 is an industrial initiative launched by German government in 2011. I40 aims at
innovating production processes in industries which promises several organizational
impacts for organizations. The initiative goal is the development of cyber-physical sys-
tems (henceforth CPS) which allow the interconnection between machines and human
resources as well as the machine self-decision making [19]. In fact, this latter feature
allows to predict and correct malfunctions in assembly line by machineries without hu-
man interactions [25].
The realization of these organizational impacts goes through an effective implemen-
tation of a mix of advanced technologies which enables CPS. These technologies have
presented as follows:
5
• Internet of things (henceforth IoT) describes the operation, in which physical prod-
ucts and machinery are equipped with sensors like Radio-Frequency Identification
(RFID henceforth) in order to capture, process, and communicate in real-time data
to humans as well as other machineries. These technology requires sensors and ac-
tuators to acquire and communicate through a WIFI network [44].
• Big Data refers to technologies allowing to analyze a massive set of unstructured or
semi-structured data, which is not possible to analyze by traditional data process
methods owing to their complexity in order to reveal patterns, trends, and associa-
tions, especially relating to human behavior and interactions [19].
• Additive manufacturing is an “umbrella term” which employs different technolo-
gies, such as 3D printing, to produce a high quality real objects by adding material
rather than by mechanically removing or milling material from a solid block [2].
• Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Hologram are advanced technologies which
aim at designing products, operation planning, factory layout planning, system
maintenance through specific hardware and software without using real materials
[20, 33].
• Cloud manufacturing is the cloud computing technology that is applied to the man-
ufacturing area. Indeed, Cloud manufacturing is mainly employed for its ability to
make the entire manufacturing plant integrated and capable of distributing machines
as a service [4, 30, 47].
Regarding the I40 organizational impacts, there is a consensus in literature which
connects the interoperability of I40 technologies to positive organizational impacts on
sustainability [13, 19]. Indeed, I40 seminal paper explained the full potential and the
promising organizational impacts of I40. With regards to the economic dimension, I40
leads to a higher process flexibility, higher decision making, chance to create new ser-
vices and products [15]. Whereas in terms of the environmental and social dimension,
I40 leads to energy savings and a better work life balance for employees [19]. In line
with this, similar industrial initiatives undertaken around the world, like Industrial In-
ternet in U.S. and Made In China 2025 in China, have agreed on these benefits [13].
As a result, because of a plethora of technologies deployed in I40 and industrial
initiatives with different names around the world, the knowledge of I40 organizational
impacts and I40 empirical studies resulted fragmented. To address this gap, Kang et al.
2016 [20] performed a non-systematic literature reviewed both initiatives portraying
core technologies, benefits and empirical case studies, respectively. On the other hand,
Piccarozzi et al. 2018 [37] performed a rigorous and systematic literature review of I40
in management literature focusing only on I40 without considering Industrial Internet
and individual technologies. Therefore, a systematic literature regarding I40 organiza-
tional impacts on sustainability which includes keywords from both initiatives and tech-
nologies is still lacking.
3 Research Method
Our investigation aims at detecting I40 organizational impacts on sustainability from
I40 empirical case studies. First of all, we conducted a rigorous [6] and systematic
6
literature review applying the protocol by Webster et al. 2002 [46]. Table 1 shows the
details of literature search we performed over the SCOPUS database of indexed scien-
tific publications in February 2019.
Because of various and similar initiatives, the query contains “Industry 4.0” and key-
words which researchers frequently employed as a synonym of I40 applications like
internet of things, smart factory, cyber physical systems [37] as well as Industrial In-
ternet which is an equivalent initiative developed in U.S. [13]. In addition, we used a
set of secondary keywords, namely implementation, application and adoption since
they point to empirical adoption of the I40.
We encompassed in the database only papers containing industrial empirical case
studies which adopted I40 technologies. Since I40 is also used as a buzz word which
refers to the interconnection of technologies, the initial hits of our research included
several papers from different sectors as smart building, agriculture and e-health. Ac-
cordingly, we excluded those papers as well as theoretical survey papers which is also
the cause of the cause of the large drop between the initial hits (386) to the first exclu-
sion step (25). Still, an author and reference forward and backward search was con-
ducted to ensure exhaustiveness [35, 46].
The final query produced 18 entries which have employed as database to identify the
I40 organizational impacts. Figure 2 shows the publication trend. Hence, afterwards we
accomplished the literature review research, we conducted qualitative coding tech-
niques to explore and elucidate the various organizational impacts on sustainability. We
maintain a qualitative rigor following the canons by [8]. We employed as a sensitive
device all the organizational impacts of the TBL in Figure 1. More specific, we consid-
ered all the benefits which I40 technologies led to the organization for each paper. We
then distinguished those benefits according to the three sustainability dimensions of the
TBL, namely the economic, social and environmental dimension.
Table 1. Literature search for Empirical I40 Case Studies
Item
Description
Source
Scopus
Query
TOPIC: “industry 4.0” OR “industrial inter-
net” OR “internet of thin*” OR “smart fac-
tor*” OR “cyber physical system*” AND
"implementation*" OR "application*" OR
"adoption*”
Refined by: LANGUAGES: (ENGLISH),
Subject Area: Business, Management and
Accounting, Source Type: Journals
Hits
386
Papers retained after:
- Title and abstract selection
- Full-text selection
- Backward and forward search
25
10
18
7
4 Results
The literature review search revealed 18 I40 empirical case studies in which the I40
applications led to organizational impacts on sustainability. We summarized organiza-
tional impacts in Table 2.
With regards to the organization impacts on economic dimension, all the I40 appli-
cations fully supported this dimension. Indeed, the literature review showed I40 appli-
cation which improved various back-end processes realizing cost reduction and higher
efficiency. As a matter of fact, there is a general consensus stating that IoT applications
into inventory management and warehouse management improved the efficiency and
effectiveness of the supply chain management reducing the inventory inaccuracy and
the time of receiving the goods by consumers [9, 18, 36]. Still, Reif et al. 2009 [38]
added that providing workers decision support via head-mounted displays significantly
reduces the required time for the picking process.
Moreover, according to Mourtzis et al. 2019 [31] and Sayar et al. 2018 [40] I40
applications, particularly IoT, provided new avenues to deliver enhanced services.
While 3D printing applications affected positively small medium production of prod-
ucts allowing organization to produce different goods [1]. Likewise, I40 affords an im-
proved managerial decision-making capability in organizations, thanks to the improved
analytics capabilities of the data produced by the digital infrastructures. Indeed,
Shahbaz et al. 2012 [42] proposed a data mining techniques in manufacturing industry
in order to deliver information to improve the product manufacturing life cycles and
eventually the economic performance of the industry. Furthermore, Lee et al. 2013 [26]
argued that I40 allows predictive analysis on the organizational processes and providing
a promptly maintenance on production mistakes.
Figure 2. Publication trend of the empirical I40 case study
Whit regards to I40 organizational impact on environmental dimension, the literature
revealed that those impacts are generally connected to the former dimension since the
improvement of production processes led to a reduction of energy consumption and
natural resources. Indeed, according to Liang et al. 2018 and Shahbaz et al. 2012 [27,
0
1
2
3
4
5
2009 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
8
43] the analysis of the big data through an analytic and predictive model allows to pre-
dict and reduce the energy consumption with the maintenance of technical efficiency
within organization. Analogously, Strange et al. 2017 [45] presented a CPS study where
the application led to productivity improvement energy saving and with a resulting re-
duction of CO2 reduction.
Finally, a more articulated research proposed by Zhang et al. 2018 [50] showed how
the IoT can reinvigorate the remanufacturing processes allowing a real-time production
scheduling method, which combined with a mathematical model achieve cost reduc-
tion, dynamic management of re-manufacturable resources, and energy consumption
decrease.
With regards to I40 organizational impacts on social dimension, the literature review
found that researchers have paid little attention on it revealing only 3 case studies with
stressed on this dimension. As a matter of fact, Lee et al. 2017 [24] explained as ware-
house management systems improved the productivity increasing the employee morale.
Whereas Yuan et al. 2017 [48] considered in toto the Smart Factory adoption for oil
refinery demonstrating its operational agility, the improvement of economic competi-
tiveness, but also on the reduction of safety incident.
Finally, Braccini et al. 2019 discussed I40 application of robotics and big data where
workforce participated in the system design [5]. This user centric approach [11] led to
the various organizational impacts with affect positively all the three sustainability di-
mensions of TBL. Indeed, the production quality increased tighter with productivity.
The continuous energy consumption monitoring reduced CO2 emission and usage of
natural resources. Beyond that, organization obtained a safer work environment char-
acterized by a less intense workload and job enrichment of tasks.
Figure 3. Industry 4.0 technologies adopted into empirical I40 case studies
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
3D Printing IoT/RFID Robotics CPS Big Data Virtual
Reality
9
5 Discussion & Future Directions
Table 2 allows us to answer our research question summarizing the results of our
systematic literature review of I40 organizational impacts on sustainability. Table 2
depicts an initial stage of the I40 initiative. Indeed, most of the I40 applications con-
cerns individual technologies (e.g. 3d printings, big data or IoT) rather than a mix of
technologies which enable the full potential of I40. Figure 3 shows the technologies
adopted in the empirical I40 case studies. Within the case studies, the most studied
technology is the IoT in the warehouse and inventory management leading to several
benefits along the supply chain which impacted mainly the economic dimension. Con-
versely, 3d printing and virtual reality appeared only in one case study respectively.
Therefore, we argue that there is a need for further studies in order to understand the
advantages of these technologies. Researchers should focus on 3d printing when stand-
ing in a key role within the organizational strategy producing a small amount of high
customized goods for fulfilling individual customer [49].
The systematic literature review also revealed that several I40 applications did not
reach both the two features of I40 initiative since the CPS has not implemented in all
empirical case studies. Further research should focus on this issue investigating the
adoption barriers which impede the CPS implementation as well as how to address
them. As a matter of fact, the cybersecurity will become increasingly important in a I40
context requiring more studies for addressing this issue.
Table 2. Industry 4.0 Organizational Impacts on Sustainability by authors
Authors
I40 Organizational Impacts
Economic Dimension
Social
Dimension
Environmental
Dimension
Goyal et al.
2016 [18]
RFID embedded in inventory
management reduced inventory
inaccuracy
Cui et al.
2017 [9]
RFID implemented within sup-
ply chain management im-
proved the efficiency and ef-
fectiveness
Lee et al.
2017 [24]
Warehouse management with
RFID system improved
productivity
Improved
employee
morale
Reif et al.
2009 [38]
Virtual reality improved pick-
ing system efficiency
Zhang et al.
2018 [50]
IoT Real time scheduling sys-
tems
Reuse of the
materials
Shahbaz et al.
2012 [42]
Big data and data mining to
improve the product manufac-
turing life cycles
Shin et al.
2014 [43]
Big data and analytics model
maintained technical efficiency
Analytics
model predicted
10
Authors
I40 Organizational Impacts
Economic Dimension
Social
Dimension
Environmental
Dimension
energy con-
sumption
Thiede et al.
2018 [45]
Continuous energy monitoring
reduces energy costs
CO2 Reduc-
tions
Lee et al.
2013 [26]
Big Data and predictive analy-
sis reduced production mis-
takes
Yuan et al.
2017 [48]
CPS enhanced operational agil-
ity and improvement of com-
petitiveness
Reduction of
safety inci-
dent
Liang et al.
2018 [27]
CPS and Big data generated
Productivity improvement.
CPS and Big
data generated
Energy saving
Sayar et al.
2018 [40]
IoT generated new valuable
services
Schulze et al.
2018 [41]
Production processes resulted
more efficient thanks to CPS
CPS reduced
water usage.
Kembro et al.
2017 [21]
IoT and sensors technology
improved warehouse manage-
ment
Safer work-
place
Braccini et al.
2019 [5]
Robotics improved productiv-
ity and product quality
Safer work
environ-
ment, less
intense
work-load
and job en-
richment
Reduction of
CO2 emission
and natural re-
sources
Mourtiz et al.
2019 [31]
Robotics generated new and
advanced services
Pero et al.
2014 [36]
RFID improved the efficiency
of the supply chain
Ardanza et al.
2019 [1]
3D printing improved the effi-
ciency of small and medium
production
Furthermore, we noticed that most of the studies underpinned a deterministic tech-
nological approach. Indeed, I40 organizational benefits have connected to the delivery
of the technical systems without considering the social systems and the complex inter-
action between humans, machines, and the environmental aspects of the organizations.
These studies employed a perspective at organizational level presenting organizational
needs in terms of poor productivity and weak coordination among units which are then
addressed by I40 technologies. The social systems, composed by workers and their
11
values, are not mentioned during the adoption process. The I40 technologies themselves
lead to benefits which rely on their predetermined functionalities. However, these I40
technologies, following this perspective, improved only the economic dimension of
sustainability without considering the remaining two dimensions. Accordingly, we sug-
gest encompassing the social system and environmental issues during the I40 adoption
to fully exploits its benefits employing a socio-technical perspective [19]. Indeed, the
socio-technical perspective stated that in order to enhance the organization’s efficiency,
manager should optimize the technological and social systems conjointly, otherwise the
optimization of only system leads to inefficiency. Therefore, we argue that researchers
should apply a socio-technical perspective during I40 adoption to deliver positive or-
ganizational impacts over all TBL dimensions. Thus, we encourage management to
encompass the worker participation in the design and implementation of the new I40
systems in order to accomplish I40 organizational impacts on the social dimension [32].
Whereas, in order to generate positive organizational impacts on the environmental di-
mension, I40 technologies should be shaped following a green orientation rather than
the currently orientation. That considers as main purpose the cost reduction without
considering the reuse of resources as well as the stemming of the pollution [19]. As a
matter of fact, Braccini et al. 2019 showed how a I40 application led to positive organ-
izational impacts over the three dimensions through a green mind-set of management
and a worker participation in the I40 adoption [5].
To conclude proposing a novel research avenue, we noticed that studies from the
database adopted the lean production within I40 context. Indeed, lean production
played a vital role in the mass production systems which is devoted to improved product
quality with the aim of satisfying customers [23]. Thus, recent studies claimed that I40
and lean production can support each other [7, 39]. Accordingly, to advance our re-
search regarding I40 organizational impacts, researchers should also consider lean pro-
duction as a driver for those impacts studying also the interplay with I40 and sustaina-
bility.
Table 3 Organizational Impacts of Industry 4.0 on Sustainability by TBL
I40 Organizational Impacts by TBL
Environmental Dimension
Economic Dimension
Social Dimension
- Reduced natural
resources
. Reduced CO2 emissions
- Energy Saving
- New valuable services
- Improved Production
efficiency and quality
- Improved Supply Chain
management
- Reduced Inventory
inaccuracy
- Improved productivity
- Improved employee
morale
- Safer work
environment
- Less intense work
load
- Job Enrichment
To sum up, Table 3 photographed the state of the arts regarding the I40 organiza-
tional impacts on sustainability. The economic dimension is well accomplished since
I40 technology functionalities mainly impact this dimension through cost reduction and
12
a higher process efficiency. Still, those studies employed a perspective at the organiza-
tional level. Whereas, there is a lack of studies which employed a group and individual
perspective. Further studies should focus on addressing this gap showing in which way
the interrelation between individual worker or worker groups and I40 technologies sup-
port the economic dimension.
On the other hand, little attention has been paid on organizational impacts on the
environmental dimension. Due to the environmental issues which dominated our world,
this dimension is increasingly become more important. To support this dimension, I40
technology vendor and researchers should embrace purposes of the Green Manufactur-
ing combining with I40 initiative [16]. Indeed, Green Manufacturing aims at develop-
ing green innovation and new green products. Green Innovation refers to innovation
which is characterized by energy conservation, pollution prevention and environmental
management as well as produce products easy to recycle and less polluting.
Finally, the social dimension is not prominent in the literature. Few studies covered
this dimension where organizational benefits often are generated by a positive exter-
nality. Information systems (IS) researchers should concentrate on this dimension as
implications of I40 technologies on social systems have not investigated yet. IS re-
searchers, employing an individual and group perspective, should pay attention on how
I40 technologies should change the way of working and how these I40 technologies
improved work conditions answering questions regarding new competences needed to
handle these technologies and how I40 improve the quality of working life.
6 Conclusions, implications and limitations
Our investigation is motivated by the identification of I40 organizational impacts on
sustainability dimensions which have detected from a systematic literature review of
I40 empirical case studies. The literature review portrayed an initial empirical
knowledge regarding the I40 organizational impacts on sustainability as 18 I40 empir-
ical case studies have been found. Even though, I40 leads to the several organizational
impacts on the economic dimensions, further studies and I40 applications are required
to fully exploits the two remaining researches. This lack is due to the technologic de-
terminism perspective which surrounded the selected studies. We argue for a socio-
technical perspective to address this gap. Beyond, we also argue for further investiga-
tions at individual and group level to advance the knowledge regarding the I40 benefits.
The investigation proposed presents both implication for practitioners and research-
ers. Regarding the implication for practitioners, Table 2 can be seen as a repository of
existing effective I40 implementations. It is useful for practitioners since it highlights
the spawned organizational impacts acknowledging the role of the modern technologies
such as internet of things, cloud, big data, robotic systems, 3D printing.
Regarding the implication for researchers, the literature review summarized our
knowledge regarding I40 initiatives, these advanced technologies and their positive or-
ganizational impacts on sustainability proposing new avenues. Still, the investigation
also opens for socio-technical approach in order to maximize organizational impacts
13
for I40. This triggers further consideration regarding the “fit” between the two systems
in terms of job satisfaction, knowledge, task structure and social value [32].
Furthermore, Table 2 can be used to improve IS theories like the adaptive structu-
ration theory which is a meta-theory for accounting the change by a technology within
the sociotechnical systems [3]. Indeed, from these I40 case studies we can detect and
extend the construct of technology dimensions for I40 [10]. Indeed, Bostrom et al. 2009
claimed for “further research exploring and identifying a complete set of features and
dimensions [of technologies] would be useful” (pg. 27) [3]. Finally, the study limitation
is that we employed SCOPUS database. This does not cover all the accessible sources
of I40 and similar initiatives. Accordingly, an interesting avenue to extend our literature
review, is to embrace further database such as Web of Science (WOS), EBESCO and
JSTOR.
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