Defining stages of the Industry 4.0 adoption via indicator sets

As Industry 4.0 offers significant productivity improvements, its relevance has grown across various organisations. While it captures the attention of both the industry and the academia, very few efforts have been made to streamline useful indicators across stages of its implementation. Such work facilitates the development of strategies that are appropriate for a specific stage of implementation; therefore, it would be significant to a variety of stakeholders. As a result, this paper aims to establish an indicator system for adopting Industry 4.0 within the context of the three stages of the innovation adoption: (i) pre-adoption, (ii) adoption, and (iii) post-adoption. First, a comprehensive review was performed with a search expanding into the literature on innovation and technology adoption. Second, the resulting indicators were filtered for relevance, redundancy, description, and thorough focus discussions. Finally, they were categorised by their stage of adoption. From 469 innovation adoption indicators found in the literature, this work identified a total of 62 indicators relevant for the Industry 4.0 adoption, in which 11, 14, and 37 of them comprised the three stages, respectively. Case studies from two manufacturing firms in the Philippines were reported to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed indicator system. This work pioneers the establishment of an indicator system for the Industry 4.0 adoption and the classification of such indicators into three stages — pre-adoption, adoption, and post-adoption — which would serve as a framework for decision-makers, practitioners, and stakeholders in planning, strategy development, resource allocation, and performance evaluation of the Industry 4.0 adoption.