INDUSTRY 4.0 IMPLEMENTATION IN EMERGING COUNTRIES: CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES AND STRATEGIES

Abstract

The digitalization of the manufacturing industry is becoming an absolute reality as we are on the verge of experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 has both prolonged the possibilities of digital transformation and increased its importance to the manufacturing industries not only in developed countries but also in emerging countries around the world by the integration of digital and physical technological factors such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), additive manufacturing, robotics, cloud computing, machine learning and so on. The aim is to drive more flexible, responsive, and interconnected enterprises (Santos et al., 2017). This evolving digitized platform is going to connect people, products, plants, ICT, businesses and supply chain networks together to create proactive intelligent manufacturing systems that will bring optimum ramifications. This paper focuses on the relevance and impact of this manufacturing revolution of limitless opportunities to the welfare of emerging economies such as Thailand, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and so forth. It is apparent that the fourth industrial revolution will bring tremendous benefits such as agility and automation in factories, profit optimization and so on to the emerging economies. However, it will also require the respective Governments to make an astounding amount of initial investment to develop the essential infrastructure to embrace such prospects (“Economies around the world,” 2017). Whenever opportunities are mentioned, there are certain challenges as well and this industrial revolution is no different in this aspect for emerging economies. Industry 4.0 represents a combination of infinite hope and ambiguity for the emerging nations because the overall implication of such technological revolution is yet to be figured out from a wider perspective. Therefore, in this paper, we first discuss potential opportunities such as the accomplishment of optimum productivity, increased efficiency and ideal facilitation of energy and resource management and we also attempt to recognize the pivotal challenges such as the rapid shift from emerging countries being a source of cheap labor to being able to integrate advanced technology in the production. Overall macroeconomic effect in the short-run and long-run in emerging economies include loss of jobs and a shortage of required skill set to tackle such advancement. Furthermore, this paper concludes with some concrete suggestions for how emerging countries can overcome the challenges while embracing limitless growth opportunities through the implementation of Industry 4.0.