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Top1. Introduction
The present industrial consumption and production patterns provide huge impacts on the environment, for example, a worldwide increase in temperature, loss of biodiversity, air, soil, and water contamination, etc. In this sense, sustainable consumption and production (SCP) are increasing attention among stakeholders (Erlandsson and Tillman, 2009), which pushes the industries to adopt SCP practices along the value chain (Koplin et al., 2007). Focusing on SCP in an industry helps firms to lead the market with a focus on higher processes, people, and planet gains (Colbert and Kurucz, 2007; Porter and Kramer, 2006).
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are contributing to a sustainable society (Cerri and Terzi, 2016). In line with this, in order to improve the efficiency of business activities such as manufacturing, production, and consumption, an innovative research solution has been proposed as ‘Sustainable Consumption and Production through Information and Communication Technology’ (Hilty and Aebischer, 2015; Grant et al.,(2019). Sustainability through ICT modules has received huge recognition in the industry in terms of sustainable effects on production processes and energy use (Lu et al., 2014).
From an industrial context, there is an immense potential for ICT to support sustainable development (Klimova et al., 2016; Morrar et al.,2019) in its various activities such as handling, transport, recovery, stockpiling, data representation, and exchange of information through different equipment, sensors, data administration instruments, etc. (Yang and Huang, 2016; Taylor, 2015; Hack and Berg, 2014). ICT can provide huge advantages to business in terms of cost savings, workers’ satisfaction, and reduction of waste by optimizing the resources, enhancing communication between members, supporting management functions, and improving the decision-making capabilities (Goodrum et al., 2016).
ICT has turned into a significant criterion for SCP activities; however, the research on ICT developments and application is somewhat limited in the context of SCP (Chugh et al., 2016). The reason is lack of infrastructure and facilities, lack of expertise, governance, and finance, etc (Clemons and Row, 1991). In nutshell, SCP can be accomplished by the selection of the right ICT practices in production, configuration, consumption, and disposal to achieve growth, gain efficiency, and reduce cost and time (Hassani et al., 2017).
The research questions that this paper proposes are:
- 1.
What are the ICT based factors for successful adoption and execution of SCP in Indian automotive companies?
- 2.
How the factors are organized based on their importance that influences the effectiveness of the case companies?
The current paper listed the following research objectives:
- 3.
To recognize the factors of ICT relevant to SCP in an industrial context.
- 4.
To model the factors to establish their priority.
- 5.
To test the applicability of the proposed framework in the industry.
This work aims to list and evaluate ICT based factors, which are responsible for the implementation of SCP in an industrial context. These factors of ICT have a noteworthy effect on the environment, economy, and society, and help enhance the proficiency and profitability of the automotive value chain. The factors linked to ICT are identified through an intense literature survey and experts’ feedback. The data for this work has been taken from three automobile companies from India. In this objective, we computed the adoption index values for the suggested framework of factors by taking multiple automotive case companies through the Graph Theory and Matrix Approach (GTMA) technique. The applicability of the proposed framework is tested by Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.
The automotive industry is an important division with a substantial number of medium and small measured automotive providers, however, due to rising prices of oil and scarcity of natural resources; it becomes the most required sector for technology advancements and innovation. The Indian automobile business has turned out to be the world's fourth-leading automotive industry (IBEF, 2018). Concurrently, the Indian automotive industry needs to cut its carbon emissions, improve cost efficiency, and contribute to human welfare through responsible consumption and production. In this sense, ICT advancements can help Indian automotive industries to adopt and promote SCP practices in business.