Industry 4.0 : achieving competitive advantage by being an early adopter

The concept of Industry 4.0 has been an important topic among manufacturing companies and researchers since it was first introduced in 2011. Companies have now started to realize its importance and how it will change their industries in the future. Therefore, companies have started to study this concept to understand the benefits and improvements it can bring to them. While companies are making plans for this concept of Industry 4.0, they have also one important decision to be made, to be among the first ones to implement these technologies or not and just follow the actions of their competitors. This paper is aimed at providing information for this decision with insights from six different supply chain professionals combined with existing literature.