Opportunities and challenges of the industry 4.0 in industrial companies: a survey on Moroccan firms

Industry 4.0 is a concept that represents a whole new vision of the factory where components and machines are becoming intelligent and are part of a network based on a heterogeneous integration of data and knowledge. This is what we tend to designate today as the factory of the future or the intelligent factory. Nowadays, industries in developed countries are experiencing this revolution and are achieving a very high level of performance. On the other hand, for emerging countries, they are beginning to enter this industrial era. Morocco is one of the countries that adopt an industrial acceleration plan to create an efficient industry, and to increase the industrial share in the national GDP (gross domestic product). The aim of this paper is to study the opportunities and challenges of the industry 4.0 in Moroccan firms. Based on the use of data from a large-scale survey of 11 industrial sectors representing 1200 companies of the industry in Morocco, we studied what technologies 4.0 are most used by these companies and according to which sectors, and what are the benefits that 4.0 technologies can bring to these industries. We show also the internal and external obstacles that hinder these industries in achieving and implementing these digital technologies. This work contributes by in providing a background to advance research on real benefits of the industry 4.0.