Category: Report

The transition to sustainability coincides with an industrial digitalization. While this latest industrial revolution creates new challenges, it also revives historical ones encountered in previous transitions. Through two parallel systematic reviews, challenges are identified for the current digitalization transition and historical transitions: mechanization, electrification and computerization.

The aim of this research is to identify lessons from history that may help overcome the challenges of industrial digitalization. The paper provides illustrative examples of social factors that are either internal to a technology adopting organization or external, related to wider societal change. These factors suggest actionable insights that may support the adoption of Industrial Digital Technologies.

This research was conducted by Dr. Ahmad Beltagui, Dr. Brian Sudlow of Aston University Dr. Miying Yang and Glen Jonata.of Cranfield University, and Qinglan Liu of Exeter University.

Although the importance of digitalisation as a critical source of innovation and competitiveness among manufacturers is widely accepted, manufacturers struggle to make the necessary investments to capture these opportunities. To support manufacturers with their digitalisation journey, it is critical to develop a detailed understanding of the digital investment challenges manufacturers are facing and how they can be overcome.

This report provides the findings of a systematic review of the academic and grey literature carried out to establish the state of the art on what is known on the diverse organisational, technical and process challenges manufacturers are facing with their investment into digitalisation and the good practices that are available to address them. It also evaluates the current theoretical contributions and gaps in the existing literature to develop a research agenda to help researchers target and accelerate their future investigations on the digitalisation of the manufacturing industry.

This research was conducted by Dr Andreas Schroeder, Dr Yang Zhao and Dr Daniel Andrews of Aston University.