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Top1. Introduction
It is evident from the experience of manufacturing companies though few, who have already adopted I4.0 practices partially or fully, that I4.0 has tremendous potential to bring operational excellence in terms of increased speed, flexibility, reliability, quality, and reduced cost like never before (Ben Wang, 2018). Basically, it provides data-driven smart solutions to the existing and futuristic complex problems by converging and controlling physical devices (i.e., sensors, actuators, smart machines, various devices, and equipment) seamlessly with the help of emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics (BDA) and customized software solutions (Bajic et al., 2020). Further to this, the sustainable effect of this convergence to the whole value chain can be experienced only by expanding the automation and digitalization to overall business operations (Bhatia & Kumar, 2020). Here, the main objective of this convergence is to create a smart factory where every manufacturing process will be intelligent and autonomous, which on its own will be able to make smart decisions regarding manipulating capacity, capability, maintenance, without much human intervention (Kang et al., 2016; Türkeş et al., 2019; Baicun Wang et al., 2020).
In this pretext, having realized the I4.0’s immense potential to transform the industrial operations into smart and sustainable operations, Indian Manufacturing industries, under the guidance and support of the Indian government through various schemes, are embracing digitalization and smart practices aggressively. The government’s key initiatives like the national skill development mission (2015) and National Education Policy (2020) reflect the urgency and urge to prepare a favorable and sustainable environment conducive to all kinds of local and international businesses operations in India.
It is highly encouraged that lean thinking coupled with I4.0 practices eliminate waste in processes and logistics at various stages of operations increases production flexibility (Pinto et al., 2019). Lean production and lean tools should be employed successfully and efficiently to realize the benefits of I4.0 (Tortorella et al., 2021). I4.0 technologies can enhance the adoption process of green production (Dev et al., 2020) ultimately leverage the I4.0 advancements. Green technologies are observed as one of the crucial pillars of I4.0, which helps promote environment-friendly production and processes and reduce wastages (Vrchota et al., 2020). Although I4.0, as reflected through earlier literature, has tremendous scope to achieve sustainable manufacturing, there are still a lot of hidden opportunities to explore its full strength by incorporating lean-green practices in manufacturing while approaching I4.0 adoption. It paves a new way to explore the synergy between lean-green and I4.0 (Nedjwa et al., 2022) to unpack the new dimensions of sustainability to adopt I4.0.
Even though the Indian government is taking many initiatives, barring a few industries and associations, others have not yet gathered confidence and trust in the proposed smart practices. The apprehension is mainly because of the missing knowledge and assessment of the perceived barriers in lean-green and I4.0. In this realm, proposed comprehensive research, which is robust and based on a large dataset, intended to analyze and evaluate barriers of lean-green and I4.0. Further grouping them in the most significant roadblocks and deriving interconnect among them becomes highly relevant to clear the myths, ambiguities, and apprehensions regarding implementing the I4.0 vision focusing on its relevance to lean and green concepts.
The primary objectives of this study are listed below: