A self-assessment framework for supporting continuous improvement through IoT integration

Abstract

The emergence of Industry 4.0 provides the promise of reaching a new plateau of productivity by supplying new means of process excellence, and as such, it brings many opportunities as well as challenges to practitioners. However, the knowledge of the process related to adopting digital technologies in organizations is scarce and so is the knowledge related to managing and measuring progress. Several maturity models and adaptations of other well-known frameworks are used to strategically address the digital transformation, but there is a need for more operational and context-specific guidance towards the integration of digital technologies, such as IoT. The purpose of this paper is to propose, following a design science approach, a self-assessment framework, which seeks to guide organizations in improving the performance of their existing processes through the integration of IoT. The framework aims at enabling individual organizations to assess their processes continuously from an information flow perspective (i.e. location, processing capabilities and use) identifying improvement potential to be leveraged by integrating such technology.