Managing the Barriers of Industry 4.0: Indian Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Perspective

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is a panacea for the current challenges faced by the pharmaceutical supply chain in India. However, there remain several barriers to adopting the technologies of I4.0 in the Pharma Supply Chain. This paper aims to identify these barriers and analyze the inter-relationship among selected barriers. A detailed literature review has been conducted to discover these barriers to I4.0 implementation. Further, the top few significant barriers to I4.0 implementation in Indian Pharmaceutical Supply Chain were selected. Ten industry experts were asked to complete a questionnaire based on a matrix of pairwise influence. Data collected from these responses were analyzed using the Dematel approach. The paper discusses the importance of these barriers and their cause-and-effect relationship. Lack of technology maturity, Lack of flawless integration and compatibility among various technologies and Security concerns are identified as the critical barriers, and it is estimated that elimination of these barriers would help Indian Pharma Supply Chain to remove other majority of barriers. The cause-and-effect relationship developed would help the Indian Pharma industry implement Industry 4.0 in their Supply Chains.