Industry 4.0 Implementation Barriers in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: A Focus Group Study

Abstract

The attention devoted to Industry 4.0 by scholars, managers and policy makers has grown exponentially in the last few years. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate the main barriers and difficulties faced by small and medium sized enterprises in Industry 4.0 implementation. We perform a systematic literature review on the topic and conduct some focus group studies in four countries (USA, Italy, Austria, and Thailand). We identify a set of barriers and obstacles and classified them into six categories: economic-financial, cultural, competencies/ resources, technical, legal, and implementation process. The results of the study have significant implications for both scientific research and management practice.

SME 4.0: The Role of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Digital Transformation

“…The introduction of Industry 4.0 often shows difficulties and leads to headlines such as "most SME production companies are currently not yet ready for Industry 4.0", "SMEs are missing the trends of the future" or "Industry 4.0 has not arrived at SMEs" (Olle and Clauß 2015). Today, most SMEs are not prepared to implement Industry 4.0 concepts (Brettel et al 2014;Orzes et al 2018).…”

Becoming smarter : A study into Industry 4.0 and its job design effects

“…Besides practitioners and scholars creating Industry 4.0 maturity scales, recent research has focused on the lagging Industry 4.0 adoption by addressing the benefits and/or challenges of Industry 4.0 implementation (e.g. Müller, Kiel, & Voigt, 2018;Orzes, Rauch, Bednar, & Poklemba, 2018). Despite being an essential approach, the highlighted issue is currently dominated by an implementation-oriented discussion.…”

“…The slowness in adoption can also be attributed to implementationoriented barriers. Within the literature, factors related to financial, technical, legal, cultural, and implemental challenges have been found to impede the implementation of Industry 4.0 (Moktadir et al, 2018;Orzes et al, 2018). An example from the study in Chapter 5 (GS Metaal) is 'It makes no sense to implement the Axoom software -and where necessary also Trumpf software and hardware -if our own processes are not made lean and standardised first.…”

“…This opinion seems to be partially shared by other scholars, when considering the recent attention paid to the challenges to Industry 4.0 implementation. These challenges were also addressed by Orzes et al (2018) and Moktadir, Ali, Kusi-Sarpong, and Shaikh (2018) by means of a literature review combined with either focus groups or feedback from industrial managers. The attention paid to Industry 4.0 challenges is mainly focused on realisationoriented factors.…”

“…acceptance, skills, support problems) and implemental (e.g. no methodical approach) (Moktadir et al, 2018;Orzes et al, 2018) 14 . But the issue of a lagging presence of the phenomenon could also be attributed to the decision-making phase that precedes implementation.…”