The impacts of Industry 4.0: a descriptive survey in the Italian manufacturing sector

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how much the Italian manufacturing companies are ready to be concretely involved in the so-called “Industry 4.0” (I4.0) journey. In particular, this paper focuses on analyzing the knowledge and adoption levels of specific I4.0 enabling technologies, also considering how organizations are involved and which are the main benefits and obstacles. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive survey has been carried out on a total of 103 respondents related to manufacturing companies of different sizes. Data collected were analyzed in order to answer five specific research questions. Findings The findings from the survey demonstrate that Italian manufacturing companies are in different positions in their journey toward the I4.0 paradigm, mainly depending on their size and informatization level. Furthermore, not all the business functions are adequately involved in this transformation and their awareness about this new paradigm seems quite low because of the absence of specific managerial roles to guide this revolution. Finally, there are strong differences concerning both benefits and obstacles related to the adoption of I4.0 paradigm, depending on the technology adoption level. Research limitations/implications Future research should focus on developing case studies about pilot I4.0 practitioners in order to understand the root cause of successful cases. Both managerial and practical references should be developed, helping Italian manufacturing enterprises to consolidate and strengthen their position in global competitive market. Finally, it would be interesting to carry out the same study in other countries in order to make comparisons and suitable benchmark analyses. Originality/value Despite scholars have debated about the adoption of technologies and the benefits related to the I4.0 paradigm, to the best of authors’ knowledge, only a few empirical surveys have been carried out until now on the adoption level of I4.0 principles in the manufacturing sector of a specific country.

Implementing Industry 4.0: assessing the current state

“…Finally, the authors present the results of applying their model on a heterogeneous sample of 20 SMEs in Bergamo, a city in the Northern part of Italy. These results provide a stepping stone toward the descriptive survey that reports results regarding Industry 4.0 for a larger sample of companies (see below Zheng et al, 2020).…”

“…The tenth article with the title "The impacts of Industry 4.0: A descriptive survey in the Italian manufacturing sector", analyzes the knowledge and adoption levels of specific Industry 4.0 technologies (Zheng et al, 2020). The article sees levels of knowledge in a company regarding specific technologies as a good predictor of later adoption of the same technologies.…”

“…2.1.4 Survey/model cluster. The fourth cluster, which we will refer to as the survey and model cluster, comprises of two articles, the first of which provides the results of a survey among a large sample of manufacturing companies in Italy to assess how they implemented Industry 4.0 (Zheng et al, 2020). The second article from this survey/model cluster shows how a large sample of manufacturing companies in South West of the USA implemented Industry 4.0 (Bosman et al, 2020).…”

To The Question Of Assessing The Maturity Level Of Industry 4.0

“…The problems of the development of Industry 4.0 are widely reflected in the works of many researchers: security and privacy in industry 4.0 (Alcaraz et al, 2020); safety digitalization (Savon et al, 2019); machine diagnostic methods applicability in the perspective of industry 4.0 (Asad et al, 2018); business intelligence (Bordeleau et al, 2019); national and regional comparative advantages in key enabling technologies (Ciffolilli & Muscio, 2018); model compression for IoT applications (Fu et al, 2020); prospects of using virtual technologies in modern corporate business systems (Klochko & Brizhak, 2019); modeling the management system of open innovation in E-economy (Kudryavtseva et al, 2018); Big Data approach (Kumar et al, 2018); digital supply chain model (Lizette Garay-Rondero et al, 2019); digitization and industry 4.0 optimization potential (Wirth & Klein, 2018); deep learning model in industry 4.0 (Ma et al, 2020); data science challenges (Piccialli et al, 2020); modelling of energy (Shinkevich et al, 2020); smart job shop under industry 4.0 (Wang et al, 2020); the impacts of industry 4.0 (Zheng et al, 2019) and ext.…”

Process Planning in Industry 4.0—Current State, Potential and Management of Transformation

“…That particular study also mentions that the main impact can be seen in increasing manufacturing process efficiency, which can be related to the highest importance being given to hardware and software connectivity and flexibility, which increases process efficiency [49]. In Italian companies, the highest importance was given to cloud computing technologies, ICT integration (machinery, electronic equipment and database), but also the use of new technologies (i.e., additive manufacturing), has shown to be one of the priorities for digital transformation strategy [50], while another research (also from Italy) has shown that many of the participants from the industry have no knowledge of cloud-based technologies and the use of augmented and virtual reality in the working environment, which is similar to Croatian companies [51]. Research conducted in Polish companies also implied high importance of investment in new hardware and software technologies, but also in human resources [52], while research from South Africa has shown a similar result of importance in innovativeness level, but also the difference in big data system development, where their result has shown very high awareness of the benefits from this kind of data processing, unlike Croatian companies, who are still mostly not aware of importance of this key Industry 4.0 element [53].…”