Industry 4.0 Operationalization Based on an Integrated Framework of Industrial Digitalization and Automation

The utilization of Digitalization and Automation (DA) is currently one of the determining factors of increasing prosperity, productivity, and efficiency. Although widely promoted and incentivized by policy- and decision makers, industrial enterprises seem reluctant to actively push DA-development in their organizations. From a scientific point of view, we find missing operationalization resulting in a lack of analysis and understanding of basic DA-elements in real production environments as the main barrier towards Industry 4.0- and DA-implementation. Thus, in this paper we introduce a novel approach to transfer abstract Industry 4.0-concepts into industrial environments through the utilization of basic concepts of industrial digitalization and automation. Based on this framework we develop a model to assess the degree of digitalization and automation of value creation factors and organizational factors (DAVO). Knowledge about the company’s DAVO-degree enables their decision makers to derive operational Industry 4.0 target-states, define strategies thus decide targeted investments into organizational and technological developments. We applied the developed and operationalized measurement-metric and model in an empirical study in the Austrian industry assessing the DAVO-degree of 200 industrial companies. Besides insights into their maturity status, we find clear evidence in our study for the need of operationalized Industry 4.0-concepts. Furthermore, the DAVO-approach seems to encourage practitioners to reflect their organization’s DA-status with more accuracy thus enables them to derive more targeted and sustainable strategic steps.