A Framework for Technology Selection and Impact Evaluation of Digitalisation in the Industrial Sector

The wide global competition that manufacturing companies are subjected to is forcing them to invest in the application of digital technologies. Moreover, government initiatives such as Plattform Industrie 4.0 or Made in China 2025 represent another external push for the implementation of the digital transformation in the industrial and manufacturing sector. However, evidence from literature and surveys show that there is still a lack of clarity regarding the economic benefit of digitalisation as well as a lack of guidelines that indicate which industrial process is worth digitalising and with which technology. To address this issue, this work develops a methodological framework that aims to provide guidance in the choice of new digital technologies. The framework is divided into four levels and follows a top-down recursive approach, moving from the strategic level to the digital technology level. Enriched with a mathematical formulation, the framework allows various different multi-criteria decision-making methods to be applied.