Progressing and advancement of Industry 4.0 in the Italian manufacturing context: a dynamic state-of-the-art

Manufacturing companies are required to provide more value-added products in a faster and more reliable way in today’s competitive market. Meantime, the rapid evolving of digital technologies is leading the fourth industrial revolution, also named as Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Although some contributions have been made in the literature to describe the state-of-the-art of I4.0 from national level perspective, it seems that there is still missing a dynamic evaluation over time concerning the evolution of the I4.0 paradigm, especially for the Italian manufacturing sector. This paper tries to fill this gap, by conducting a survey in 2019 with a sample of 102 companies and comparing the results with a first survey carried out in 2017.The results show that more companies are implementing I4.0 technologies compared to the 2017 survey, with an increase of 12%. It is also revealed that the large companies, characterized by a high level of informatization, still tend to behave better than small and medium ones. Companies consider lead time reduction and delivery of high-quality product/service as biggest benefits perceived from implementing I4.0 paradigm. As a conclusion, based on the results of the survey, authors show and describe the main levers to be adopted by practitioners in order to accelerate the 4.0 transformation.