Insights from circular supply chain implementation prospects employing industry 4.0 technologies: a study based on applied methodologies of SLR and content analysis

This research emphasized on the applicability of Industry 4.0 technologies in the domain of supply chain network exploring the relevance to circular economy. A study was conducted to portray integrated impact of two different domains: circular supply chain (CSC) and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) underlining their effects on the circular economy. The outline of this research is to determine the linkage between CSC and I4.0 to address the barriers to CSC implementation in small medium enterprises (SMEs). This research specifically focused to explore synergies, conflicts, or dependencies between CSC principles and the implementation of I4.0 technologies within SMEs citing the impact on circular economy (CE). To extract vital and conclusive insights from this research, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted followed by incorporating content analysis. A systematic procedure was adopted focused on identification of anticipated keywords/and themes having relevance to CSC linking with I4.0 applicability inferring to their core concepts and their overall impact on the circular economy. The existence of specific keywords, topics, or key concepts in a given set of qualitative data (i.e. text) having linkage with the integrated impact of CSC and I4.0 was explored employing this systematic procedure based on PACEF framework. This procedure to validate this research encompasses six different steps – research convention (defining the study's parameters), search (identifying search terms and database types), evaluation (consistent standards for the inclusion and rejection of literature as well as for evaluating the quality), amalgam (extrapolating and classifying data), scanning (describing outcome before coming to a decision), and finally reporting the results (describing the process used and releasing the outcome to the communal), entire procedure being abbreviated as CSEASR. This research yielded significant inferences on the combined effects of CSC and I4.0 on the circular economy that will aid eradicate barriers to CSC deployment with the usage of I4.0 technologies for SMEs.