The impacts of Logistics 4.0 on Italian manufacturing companies: an exploratory survey

This paper explores how Italian manufacturing companies are approaching towards Logistics 4.0 (L4.0) by adopting an exploratory survey on a sample of 91 Italian manufacturing companies. The results show that companies have very limited knowledge regarding L4.0 enabling technologies. The adoption of digital technologies to support logistics is also very immature. Moreover, the benefits and obstacles are analysed, among which productivity improvement is perceived as the highest benefit, while investment on technologies and missing digital competencies are considered as obstacles for L4.0 adoption. In addition, ‘Company size’ and ‘Current automatization level of warehouse stocking system’ are found to be the factors that affect the knowledge and adoption level of technologies.