Integrating Processes, People and Data Management to Create a Comprehensive Roadmap Toward SMEs Digitalization: an Italian Case Study

Digitalization is increasingly gaining interest among manufacturers. Focusing on manufacturing, this interest already turned into a necessity that cannot be further postponed. This explains why digitalization or Industry 4.0 transition characterizes most of the strategies for manufacturers irrespectively of their size or maturity level. Nevertheless, size and maturity do matter in such kind of transition. Literature and practice advocate that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)s face huge barriers to keep high the competitive advantage of their products, thus they first need to act on their processes and internal resources. Among them, lack of competencies and limited data exploitation are threatening the competitiveness for the medium-long term the most. Thus, the present contribution aims to present the results obtained from the integrated application of three maturity models focused on the skills gap, data management, and operations management within the scope of digital maturity. These maturity models were developed as stand-alone tools focusing the attention on a specific need (i.e. operations, people, or data). In this contribution, they were integrated to provide an overarching view to develop a unique roadmap towards social and economic sustainable industrial environments. The integrated model was applied to an Italian SME.