An assessment instrument for industry 4.0 and digital transformation

Abstract

Industry 4.0 focuses on operational efficiency, customizable and sustainable products. It introduced the use of automation, the integration between Internet and production processes, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to increase productivity; Industry 4.0 has experienced a continuous growth due to a high demand for personalized products and services and the accessibility of hardware and software solutions. However, digitalization faces implementation challenges because there is a lack of technical, individual, and organizational skills as well as a shortage of strategic guidance to assess the level of Industry 4.0 implementation in a company. Therefore, an assessment instrument is developed in this research. An initial version of the assessment instrument was developed based on current literature. Subsequently, a focus group, based on experts from the automotive industry, and a systematic literature review that followed the PRISMA methodology, were performed to improve the instrument and validate it. The main findings are focused on the most relevant dimensions and Industry 4.0 technological and organizational drivers and barriers. The proposed tool consists of 144 questions with 10 different dimensions. These dimensions are: Strategic direction, cultural and organizational structure, Leadership, Clients, Workforce, Smart factories, Smart products and services, Technology, Supply chain, Operation, and Governance. The answers are divided into 5 different levels that determine the organization’s Industry 4.0 current level. This instrument is more flexible, adaptable, robust, and comprehensive compared to the ones found in literature. However, there are limitations in the research, e.g., the focus group involved experts of only 5 areas of the company (continuous improvement, maintenance, engineering, information technology and production), the results of the assessment instrument are only qualitative, several papers from the systematic literature review were not available for full- text, among others. Furthermore, the future research includes carrying out a case study, include quantitative information to broaden the analysis of Industry 4.0 level in a company such as following Fuzzy logic and the Analytical Hierarchy Method to interpret the qualitative information into numerical data and allow companies eliminate ambiguity in their results. Additionally, the use other software to enrich the systematic literature review such as ChatGPT and adapt the assessment instrument to the service industry.