Investigating the Integration of Industry 4.0 and Lean Principles on Supply Chain: A Multi-Perspective Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The development of digital technologies in all aspects of human life leads to increasing the necessity for investigating them in the Supply Chain (SC) as the main channel to provide products. Moreover, Lean principles, with the aim of reducing wastes, could be one of the main research streams in SC in recent years. Therefore, it is valuable to figure out the mutual effects of Lean principles and digital technologies as two growing areas in SC. Previous works did not pay attention to investigating this relationship at the SC level and were more focused on the production level. However, the present work addresses this issue by conducting a multi-perspective Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Additionally, in the present SLR, the impact of individual Industry 4.0 technologies in relation to Lean principles was investigated from various SC perspectives. The results reveal the necessity of studying single SC processes in Lean Digital SC. Moreover, the applicability of each technology should be illustrated to alleviate SC operational and organizational issues. The results provide useful insights about applying single digital technologies as well as a combination of them to each SC process to solve specific issues.