Significance of Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE): Mediating Its Role Between Industry 4.0 Implementation and Operational Excellence

The inception of advanced manufacturing technologies has led to a drastic increase in competition. The concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is coined by Germany during the Hannover fair in the year 2011 to handle the manufacturing complexities and dynamic customer demands. Unparalleled benefits of I4.0 implementation have urged the industries to work in this direction. There is a plethora of research available in the context of I4.0 technologies but its implementation, human factors, and ergonomics aspects are not so much explored and still under investigation. In the proposed research, factors affecting the I4.0 implementation are identified through an extensive literature review. Research questions and the hypotheses are formulated. The questionnaire is prepared; area experts from industries are contacted to collect the responses. Data is collected from 471 manufacturing industries. AMOS 22.0 is used to test the hypotheses. All factors including production and operations management, organizational and procedural are found to affect I4.0 implementation significantly. Also, human factors and ergonomics are found to mediate the relationship between I4.0 implementation and operational excellence. Practical implications to industrial managers and practitioners have been discussed. This will help them to analyze the bottlenecks and assess the organization's readiness toward the I4.0 implementation.