An Interpretive Structural Analysis for Industry 4.0 Adoption Challenges

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) adoption provides an opportunity for high-technology-based, value-added processes and requires an infrastructural transformation and more qualified employee involvement. The I4.0 literature contains researches presenting an awareness, guidance, and complementary activities for an I4.0 concept. However, there is no detailed study focusing on the challenges and implementation problems in I4.0 adoption. Hence, the purpose of this paper is determining the I4.0 adoption challenges and analyzing these barriers based on the expert opinions. The methodology within the scope of this paper contains the literature review, interviews with experts who are responsible for the I4.0 projects at Bosch, analyzing the determined barriers by interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and cross impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis. The barriers are investigated in a structural base, the relationships between these challenges have been identified, and finally how barriers affect each other has been presented in order to discover the root cause triggering the other factors. An I4.0 practitioner can infer from these two analysis results that which challenge should be focused first in order to reach a solution. Additionally, an ISM case study results provides a general view to the I4.0 adoption process. A practitioner can also decide on what to do first by criticizing the results so that they can reduce the negative effects of the adoption process.