Abstract
The Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm is considered one of the most trending topics in the academic and industrial context, that involves emerging technologies that can make the processes increasingly integrated and provide digital solutions for supporting companies towards the greater flexibility required by the market. To date, the scientific literature strongly addressed the development of enabling technologies and the assessment of their impacts in different industrial contexts. However, there is a lack of studies providing empirical evidence about how manufacturing companies are facing the digital transformation, in particular for smaller industrial realities. For this reason, this paper aims to study the knowledge, readiness, and dissemination level of the I4.0 paradigm and enabling technologies for Italian Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). A web-based survey was conducted, and 77 companies were interviewed. The survey results underline that MSMEs still have limited knowledge about I4.0 and are not well prepared for its implementation.
1. INTRODUCTION
The modern industrial context is transforming itself, making more use of digital rather than physical processes that allow to increase customer satisfaction, enhance knowledge, reduce inefficiencies, and improve the ability to decide. Alongside traditional production technologies and established organizational/ management paradigms, new digital technologies are emerging and consequently new managerial approaches, capable of supporting companies towards the greater flexibility required by the market. [1],[2].
Limitations and future research
This research has some limitations offering new opportunities for future research. Firstly, our work considers enterprises from different industrial sectors and each sector has its characteristics. This naturally affects the relevance given to the different survey dimensions analyzed. A more detailed analysis of differences among sectors could be relevant. Another important characteristic of our sample is that we have considered a small part of the population of small and medium-sized enterprises since the paper can be considered as a first exploratory study. Therefore, our analysis could be extended to gain a more significant finding.
