Results benchmarking study digitization of operations of Italian companies

Digital transformation, framed within the Industry 4.0 framework, represents not only an opportunity but a real necessity for companies that want to compete with increasingly innovative products and services that are of value to the customer. Therefore, digitalization must include the digitalization of processes, products, and services.

This has become the topic today for all companies belonging to all industrial sectors and not only.

The impact and the speed of this transformation depend on:

• from the internal and external context
• from the strategy
• from the investment
• from the engagement

The basic success is based on a solid design of all the factors involved.

The Benchmarking Study What’s next in Operations?, which designed and launched our Knowledge Office to measure the level of maturity of Italian companies in terms of Digital Transformation, Sustainability and Operational Excellence, has captured the state of the art and the best reference practices in Operations with a view also to human resources.

The research involved top managers from over 100 companies, 85 % of which employ more than 100 people across 22 different sectors, from plant and mechanical engineering to consumer goods, from automotive to life sciences, and from electronics and packaging to the life sciences.

The questions focused on three fundamental areas:

• Operational excellence (processes for generating, producing and distributing value to customers)
• digital transformation (technologies to create new value for customers and economic returns for the company)
• sustainability (environment and people).

Highlights

• The results of the research show that the sample surveyed shows substantial growth over the three-year period Post Covid 2020-2023 compared to the main indicators of turnover, employees, and especially market shares.
• The companies in the sample have a perceived level of digitalization as low at 36%, good at 51% , and only 9% at high and 4% at very high. This trend does not vary significantly based on the company size in terms of the number of employees.
• Processes are digitized for over 40% % of the analyzed sample, and digitalization has been planned for over 60%. In parallel, dashboards have been implemented and are planned to detect KPIs. Digital Transformation therefore mainly concerns the adoption of fundamentally "non-innovative" management systems such as ERP and MES.
  Big Data is implemented only for 12% of the analyzed sample, but almost 28% % of the analyzed sample has planned the implementation.
• The percentage of turnover invested in the digitalization of processes appears limited. In fact, more than 69% % of the sample companies invest less than 5% of their turnover in these strategic projects, and in the future investments will remain unchanged or grow slightly for 86% % of the companies surveyed.

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