Industry 4.0 Competencies for Production Equipment Manufacturers in Malaysia

Industry 4.0 refers to the revolution of the entire value chain process in manufacturing industrial bases on the basis of cyber physical production system. Industry 4.0 competency or the competency of manufacturers to react with the changes driven by Industry 4.0 is now become imperative for the manufacturers to sustain competitive advantage. Hence, the main objective for this study is to assess the Industry 4.0 competency levels, as well as to examine the relationship between Industry 4.0 competencies and Production Equipment Management (PEM) performance within production equipment manufacturers in Johor, Malaysia. This study views Industry 4.0 competencies from four different dimensions, which are Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) competency; Innovation Management competency; Organizational Learning competency and environment competency. The study is quantitative based via survey questionnaire and responded by 36 production equipment manufacturers. Through descriptive analysis, Industry 4.0 competencies and PEM performance of production equipment manufacturers in Johor are ranked as above average, and each dimension of Industry 4.0 competencies is significant and positively correlated with PEM performance. Furthermore, finding from the study also suggested that the Industry 4.0 competency of multinational companies is significantly higher than local companies in terms of ICT and environment competency. The main implication of this study is the strategy and initiatives of production equipment manufacturers in Johor in approaching Industry 4.0 need to be focused equally across all the four Industry 4.0 competencies.