A maturity assessment approach for conceiving context-specific roadmaps in the Industry 4.0 era
(2019)
The digital transformation of the production sector is setting the scene for a major industrial change. The need for supporting companies in this transformation is currently covered by several maturity models, generally operationalized through standardized questionnaires, which provide, as an outcome, an assessment of the current maturity stage and a set of general improvement recommendations according to it. However, to provide companies with a more tangible support, there is a need for more individual approach. In order to deal with this need, this paper proposes, following a design science research framework, a novel approach based on Problem-Based Learning for structuring the assessment procedure as a dialectic process. This approach aims at facilitating the contextualization of the assessed company and, consequently, the identification of context-specific improvement recommendations. The proposed approach, supported by a maturity model used for framing information collected during the assessment process, is tested in three industrial cases. Although these have been assessed at the same maturity stage, different improvement recommendations have been proposed according to contextual factors such as strategic goals, core processes and key performance indicators.
The transformation of the manufacturing sector towards Industry 4.0 is setting the scene for a major industrial change. Currently, the need for assisting companies in this transformation is covered by a number of maturity models that assess their digital maturity and provide indications accordingly. However, in order to provide operational recommendations to diverse companies, there is a need for making the assessment company-specific. To cope with this challenge, this paper provides an illustration of a new digital maturity assessment approach - 360 Digital Maturity Assessment - which is based on the Problem Based Learning (PBL) model.