Evaluation of I4.0 Technologies adoption approaches within the SMEs operations based on Multi-Criteria Analysis
Date
2023-03
Authors
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
With the introduction of business intelligence and the necessity to make informed and data-driven decisions. It is becoming a challenge for the decision makers and researchers to integrate data science into day to day operations and the decision making process. More specifically, one of the main impacted stakeholders in the business area are the Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who are struggling to catch up with the digital transformation that big companies are leading in for several technological, organizational and environmental factors.
This study comes as a solution to propose a decision-making model specified for the challenges and SMEs context to make digital transformation efforts with the focus on I4.0 technological adoption approaches.
So far, no research has given a methodology for comparing I4.0 technology adoption options within the SMEs sector in order to determine the optimum strategy that may be recommended to SMEs decision makers. The process of analyzing and comparing I4.0 technical methods for SMEs is known as Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM). The Fuzzy Decision by Opinion Score (FDOSM) and Fuzzy-Weighted Zero-Inconsistency (FWZIC) Method are two of the most preferred MCDM ranking methods. The FDOSM was designed to function in a variety of fuzzy set contexts to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty caused by the fact that expert input is subjective. (FWZIC) Method for determining criterion weight coefficients with zero consistency. To calculate its relevance level in the decision-making process, this technique relies on variances in expert preference per criteria.
This study has used FWZIC and FDOSM to provide and overall evaluation for I4.0 technological adoption approaches and to assess the top five ranked adoption approaches against the Innovation Process Framework that consists of the Technological, Organizational and Environmental aspects (TOE). Prior to this application the research gap was identified and the benchmarking framework requirements were developed to decide on the best MCDM methods.
The study consists of three main components. The application of FWZIC on the I4.0 technologies as criteria then benchmark the I4.0 adoption approaches to come up with the top five best adoption approaches for I4.0 within the SMEs using FDOSM and finally to apply FWZIC on the innovative TOE framework and evaluate the top five ranked approaches in relation to the TOE framework established weights. Decision matrices were developed along with the weighted matrices and the final phase resulted in formulation with two different weighting matrices using FWZIC and an evaluation framework according to MCDM analysis using the FDOSM application.
An application of evaluation and validation using benchmarking framework analysis, and systematic ranking was applied in order to ensure a validated framework.