Environmental sustainability consideration with just-in-time practices in industry 4.0 era – A state of the art

Abstract

There has been an escalating number of studies focusing on improvement in organizational performance through implementation of lean practices and total quality management (TQM) approaches for sustainability in internal (within a supply chain echelon) as well as external environments (across supply chain echelons). However, studies that capture the simultaneous consideration of environmental sustainability with applicability of just-in-time (JIT) practices under the influence of industry 4.0 are very limited and broadly unclear. This underscores the need for a thorough assessment of the current state and gaps in “Green-JIT,” as environmental sustainability emerges as a pivotal factor for companies aiming to align with both profitability and efficiency in the competitive global market. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. Firstly, the study aims to review the concepts of JIT, environmental sustainability and industry 4.0 by revisiting seminal research contributions from several authors in this domain. Secondly, the study identifies the importance of addressing environmental concerns simultaneously with various total JIT (T-JIT) elements and their association with industry 4.0 through a bibliometric significance analysis. Thirdly, the study presents a systematic and extensive literature review of the papers at the interface of JIT and concepts such as lean, TQM, supply chain management (SCM), environmental sustainability, and industry 4.0. The study continues to identify voids and concludes with an exhaustive set of research gaps, perspectives and future research directions.