A systematic review of the implementation of industry 4.0 from the organisational perspective

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is a fast-evolving area of research, bringing together knowledge from multiple academic fields into creative solutions for manufacturing innovation. Despite the growing amount of published work covering a wide range of I4.0 areas, there has been relatively little research devoted to the organisational side of implementing I4.0. To address this gap, this systematic review paper used quantitative analysis by text-mining 97 articles from 2015 to 2021. The analysis identified eleven research streams, which were grouped into five levels, namely industry and firm, smart factory, data, human resources and supply chain. The research streams were then comprehensively reviewed and presented. For each stream, the paper presents a number of sub-themes and highlights important findings and areas that may require further development. We discuss three important research avenues in the organisational management literature: (1) the impact of the pandemic on the implementation of I4.0, (2) the tension between value creation and value protection during the implementation of 4.0 and (3) the relevance of a contingency approach during the implementation of I4.0.