The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0): technologies disruption on operations and supply chain management

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0): technologies disruption on operations and supply chain management 1.1 Context During the last five years, journals in robotics, electronics, computer science and production engineering have devoted significant attention to Industry 4.0 and related subjects, including additive manufacturing/3D printing, intelligent manufacturing and big data (Lee et al., 2014; Xi et al., 2015; Pfeiffer et al., 2016; Mosterman and Zander, 2016; Chen and Zhang, 2015; Jia et al., 2016). A few prominent exceptions are represented by the recent attempts to shed lights on: the link between Industry 4.0 and lean manufacturing (Buer et al., 2018; Tortorella and Fettermann, 2018); the link between Internet of Things (IoT) and supply chain management (Ben-Daya et al., 2017); the impact of additive manufacturing on supply chain processes and performances (Liu et al., 2014; Oettmeier and Hofmann, 2016; Li et al., 2017); and the short-term supply chain scheduling in smart factories (Ivanov et al., 2016). Here, the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) refers to the “confluence of technologies ranging from a variety of digital technologies (e.g. 3D printing, IoT, advanced robotics) to new materials (e.g. bio or nano-based) to new processes (e.g. data driven production, Artificial Intelligence, synthetic biology)” (OECD, 2016). Whilst classical theories such as resource based view, institutional theory, chaos theory, systems theory, stakeholder theory, transaction economic cost theory, evolutionary theory to name a few may need reshaping, the issues of trust will become prominent in such a disruptive digital environment, driving major evolvement of technological singularity in the transformation process, where blockchain may play a central role with IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Carter and Koh, 2018).