Sustainability in Industry 4.0

Challenges and Remedies

Shwetank Avikal, Amit Raj Singh, Mangey Ram, Shwetank Avikal, Amit Raj Singh, Mangey Ram

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000454451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Manufacturing
• Index: Business

A large and growing number of manufacturers are realizing the substantial financial and environmental benefits of sustainable business practices. To develop more sustainable societies, industries need to better understand how to respond to environmental, economic, and social challenges and transform industrial behavior. The objective of this book is to provide the required knowledge and accelerate the transition towards a sustainable industrial system.

The book will help industries to enhance operational efficiency by reducing costs and waste. It will help them increase customer response, reach new customers, and gain competitive advantage. It offers innovation, scenario planning, and strategic analysis that goes beyond compliance, as well as case studies and remedies to the industry 4.0 challenges.

Professionals, as well as students, can refer to this book to add to their knowledge on Industry 4.0 and develop new ideas and solutions to the existing and future problems.

1 Sustainability in the New Normal

Industry 4.0 Perspective

Naim Shaikh¹, Mahesh Shinde², and Kishori Kasat³

¹Global Business School and Research Centre, Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

²Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India

³Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India

DOI: 10.1201/9781003102304-1

1.1 Introduction

Industrial development has significantly benefited the various stakeholders invovled. However, evidence shows that the manufacturing methods adopted by most industries are not environmentally and ecologically sustainable (McWilliams et al., 2014). Therefore, there is a constant demand for industrial production to be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable (Sarkis and Zhu, 2017).

Industrial sustainability calls for adoption of the principles of allocating natural resources rationally, waste reduction, and environmental and ecological conservation. At the same time, there is a wave of consumer awareness based on sustainability concepts resulting in a sustainable consumption pattern (Terlau, Wiltrud, and Hirsch, 2015).

Energy use, carbon emissions and resource utilization are the three main areas that the manufacturing sectors around the globe are focusing on for achieving industrial sustainability. Industrial sustainability is no longer a buzzword, rather a strategy to gain a competitive advantage. This advantage can be drawn by optimally using resources, including energy, and thus directly influencing the triple bottom line.

Sustainable industrial development will call for an innovative business strategy, completely altering the current business models and relationships and offering novel products and services. To achieve this “Industry 4.0” presents an innovative business model based on cyber physical systems, an integration of human effort and technology primarily focusing on reducing wastage and achieving the utmost potential of industrial processes. Industry 4.0 can be perceived differently by different industries or even within a industry. This meaning is dependent upon the strategy undertaken by that industry. However, the common elements in all this are technological connectivity of manufacturing reducing time and intelligence gap and most importantly operational excellence.

Connectivity plays an important role in adoption and implementation of industry 4.0. This connectivity has a positive impact on the entire supply chain. This will result in on demand-customised production, thereby reducing the inventory cost and wastage related to overstocking of inventory: a step ahead of just in time. Industry 4.0 will allow autonomous decision-making, enabling optimum utilization of resources, high quality at affordable cost reducing wastage, and thus catering to sustainable industrial development. This will be achieved by decentralised coordination of all the stakeholders across the value chain and synchronization of all industrial processes at one-time decision-making precision.

Switching over from manually controlled operation management to automation powered by Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing sector will allow efficient resource utilisation, flexibility in operation, quality consciousness---and at a reduced cost. Industry 4.0 thus provides a solution in the VUCA world for aligning the business agenda with the Agenda 21 of sustainable development. This also affords an opportunity to reduce the lead-time of production and achieve cost saving in the mass production process. This is easier said than done and requires primary focus on the right priorities and then integrating appropriate Industry 4.0 solutions to achieve the sustainable development goals. The solutions definitely would be unique to a particular industry and will require a specific industry-oriented approach (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Benefits of industry 4.0.

Goal 9 of Sustainable Development Goals speaks about industry innovation and infrastructure. It also points out importance of industrial infrastructure to address all sustainable development issues. It also provides for importance of technology and innovation to achieve in closed energy and resource efficiency. Development is directly related to industrialisation, which ultimately depends upon technology and innovation. Industry 4.0 provides a wonderful opportunity of achieving all these goals. This chapter analyses how Industry 4.0 solutions can be utilised for achieving these goals.

1.2 Defining Sustainability

Defining industrial sustainability is not an easy task. The definition changes with reference to time, place, and creates a major problem in aligning uniform sustainable solutions. Both environmental and ecological sustainability and ecological problems are dynamic and very much reactive to the state of affairs. These concepts are construed differently by different people in different parts of the world and even differently by same people in different perspectives and circumstances. Information dissymmetry is one of the key reasons for this disparity and differences of opinion. This is further compounded by sphere of vision of the stakeholder, technological awareness and costs associated.

The second contributory factor is the value position of the stakeholders, particularly in terms of knowledge about ecosystems and their commitment towards sustainable goals. Diverging value positions and opinions are direct consequences of incomplete information about environment and different levels of commitment towards sustainability. This creates a problem of generating a uniform solution rather defining the sustainability in a uniform commonly applicable way. Consequence being development of interesting views and opinions about sustainability and related to those diverse definitions of ecological and environmental problems and sustainable solutions for the same.

This manifests into different ways in which people define environmental problems and similar situation being interpreted in a different way depending on the location of the stakeholder and the period referred. This is the precise reason why there are different definitions of sustainability, rendering all attempts to create a universally applicable definition of sustainability a futile exercise.

One of the accepted and dominant views regarding sustainability is that of defining sustainability in terms of planetary boundaries. This concept revolves around the belief that the planet on which we are living and are dependent on has its own limits and these limits can be quantified based on the urgency. This approach is popular because it accepts there is a lack of available information, regarding boundaries, at the current moment and these cannot be clearly defined. This idea has allowed the construction of a concept of boundaries from particular to general increasing the limits of boundaries with reference to the perspectives of the stakeholders. Thus, at a primary level, there could be an individual boundary wherein the individual actions and the consequences of the same on the environment could be considered. At a slightly higher level, it would be a social boundary consisting of interaction between people at societal level and consequences on the environment. At a slightly higher level, it could affirm an industry's relationship with its stakeholders affecting the sustainable environment in different ways and paving the path for creating sustainable products and processes.

Because of this, the popular boundaries drawn by people revolve around the following aspects: Regional cluster, which talks about an industry or a group of industries and their impact on environment. At a slightly higher level, comes the bottom set of city boundary where in rather than considering the impact of an industrial production, a complete system view of production and consumption pattern of the city is taken into consideration. This can be further extended to the whole earth system and enlarged to the concept of universe.

So, while applying sustainable solutions, all agents should be at the sameboundary level or the solutions offered and the perspectives considered will notmatch with each other. Alignment of system boundaries to create uniformsustainable solutions is a primary requirement for success of this approach anddefining sustainability in this perspective. Even at this level, there exists hugeinformation dissymmetry and thus prohibits creation of constructive ideas anddefinition. In a nutshell the definition of sustainability is person-specific depending upon, “Who is analysing and what boundaries the analysis is restricted to?” Alignment of system thus plays a critical role in definition of sustainability. Brundtland commission report provided encompassing definition of the system for sustainability:

“Sustainable develyopment is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So this is about development, it s about development in the present which also takes into a ground what is possible in the future.” “Our Common Future: Report of The World Commission On Environment And Development, 1987.

This definition is not restricted to the rights of the present generation only but also considers the rights of future generations on the natural resources. The main source for evolution of the concept of sustainable development has been in the practice of forestry. Forestry teaches about harvesting capacity, sustainable yield and sustainable utilisation of forest resources.

Sustainability redefines the basis of man-nature relationships. It goes further and talks about equality and equal access to resources not only to the present generations but also to the future generations. Finally, the concept sustainable development does focus on three aspects and nature of industrial activity on these three pillars: economic, ecological and social.

1.3 Relationship Between Sustainability and Technology

Managing industrial production within the ecological constraints, ensuring the use of natural resources at par with the rate of regeneration, reducing waste generation, and ensuring biosphere conservation are few of the mandates of environmental sustainability (Herman, 1999). The idea of industrial development automatically draws attention to the concept of the ecological impact of industrialization. Technology then is regarded as unavoidable when considered as one of the major causes of ecological impact on environment. However, a different perspective shows that technology can also provide solutions to the ecological impact and seen from this perspective, technology upgradation should be the endeavour to reduce the ecological impact of there is a technology and improve the efficiency misconception that development associated with technology is antithesis to sustainability. This general trend of surrendering to the technology and accepting what technology offers needs to be replaced by an element of choice allowing to choose the type of development that technology is offering. This presents society with an opportunity of alternatives and choosing the best technology that will offer development with improved environmental performance and sustainability. The cascading effect of this would result in pursuit for search of sustainable technologies and associated sustainable development, altering the common belief of the polar relationship between technologies empowered development and sustainability.

In conclusion the changed perspective would view technology not as something inevitable and detrimental to the environment but as a wilful choice for sustainable development. This requires a serious change in management position regarding managing responsibility. Sustainability in the industrial sphere then revolves around the three pillars of responsible management, ethics and, most importantly, technological solutions.

Implementation of responsible management practices would require adoption of sustainable management tools at systems level. These tools can be classified into two types: Outcome Oriented Tools and Process Oriented Tools. Outcome oriented tools indicate the level environmental impact of activities or level of ac...