Track: Industry 4.0

Abstract

The competitiveness of a manufacturing firm largely depends on the flexibility it shows in catering sustainably to the market demands. With very little to no awareness about the global trends in sustainability, the MSMEs in developing nations are facing massive competition globally, posing a threat to their survival. Despite the potential of Industry 4.0 to make them flexible and sustainable, the managers of MSMEs find it difficult to adopt it in their firms because of their limited resources. Therefore, unbundling Industry 4.0 into its constituent technologies and prioritizing them becomes a crucial step for MSMEs. This paper aims to provide an order of preference of Industry 4.0 technologies that help enhance the sustainable performance in Indian manufacturing MSMEs with the help of Analytic Hierarchy Process and Utility-function based Goal Programming. Three Industry 4.0 technologies – Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning, and Real-Time Computing – are found to be the most important Industry 4.0 technologies for sustainable performance. Sensitivity analysis of the results further confirmed the robustness of the results. Several managerial implications have been proposed along with contributions to the body of knowledge, limitations, and future research directions.