9 / 2019-01-03 23:00:12

Development of an Integrated Framework and Assessment Method for Industrial Digitalization and Automation

Industrial Digitalization,Process Automation,Industry 4.0,Value Creation Processes

Currently, the utilization of Digitalization and Automation (DA) in integrated manners is one of the main determining factors to increase productivity thus, competitiveness in manufacturing companies – currently focused in the concepts of Industry 4.0. Although policy makers widely promote and incentivize industrial enterprises towards Industry 4.0, companies seem reluctant to actively push developments in their organization due to high topic complexity and missing tools and methods to assess and increase their company’s DA. Therefore, in this paper we aim to tackle the underlying scientific problem of missing operationalization of basic DA-elements in real production environments as well as a missing comprehensive framework to objectively measure the degree of Digitalization and Automation of Value creation factors and Organizational factors (DAVO). We present a novel integrated concept of industrial digitalization and automation as well as key metrics to measure and assess the DAVO-degree in real manufacturing companies. We successfully applied our framework and method in real production environments and derived a DAVO-questionnaire to conduct a countrywide survey in the Austrian manufacturing Industry including more than 500 companies.