• competitive advantage
• framework
• radical innovation
• strategy
• technology implementation

In today’s competitive environment, businesses face challenges to improve their performance in meeting customer’s demand. A new paradigm, Industry 4.0, is becoming more and more interesting from the strategic point of view in order to gain competitive advantage and exploit the digital transformation. However, in the current literature, there is still a lack of effort to systematically review the state of the art of this new industrial revolution wave. Therefore, the objective of the thesis is to address this gap by developing a strategic framework to support European logistics companies towards the possibilities that Industry 4.0 offers. Enabling technologies, related benefits, success factors and the challenges surrounding adopting Industry 4.0 emerged from this research.
A grounded theory approach was adopted where an analysis of literature review of both academic and trade papers from consultancy companies and empirical examples from industry experts led to identify the aspects that are likely to benefit logistics businesses.
The conclusion of the thesis is that both the literature and the interviews revealed different Industry 4.0 opportunities in terms of decentralisation, improved demand forecasting, efficiency optimisation, shortened lead times, real time information flows, reduced bullwhip effect, higher transparency and integrated supply chains. These can be principally addressed by Internet of things, advanced robotics and simulation. Furthermore, additive manufacturing could lead to strategic competitive advantage in logistics through postponement strategies.
The key success factors were identified in awareness of the potentialities of the technologies, partnerships and intellectual property exchange, whereas economic investments quantification and lack of skilled people were recognised as main adoption challenges.
Finally, the framework was validated by industry experts from DPDgroup and their criticisms and opinions were collected.