Developing a Roadmap Towards the Digital Transformation of Small & Medium Companies: A Case Study Analysis in the Aerospace & Defence Sector

Abstract

The contemporary era is pushing companies worldwide in undertaking a digital transformation path to keep high their competitive advantages acquired throughout the years thanks to their engineering competencies. Companies, especially Small & Medium ones, are getting forced to set up clear roadmaps towards an enhanced digital maturity level to address their strategic objectives. Roadmaps must support them in being both efficient and effective to keep stable their competitive advantage. Therefore, the goal of this contribution is to clarify the key elements representing the basement towards an improvement digital path and apply them to a case study. The key elements emerged to be: i) the clarification of firms’ strategic objectives, ii) the awareness about firms’ current internal digital maturity level to benchmark themselves in respect to competitors as well as their expected “desired TO-BE scenario”, and iii) the investigation of the causes and related effects that may harm the reaching of the strategic objectives. Hence, in this contribution, these three steps are deeply investigated to design a structured and tailored roadmap leading a company to reach an increased level of digital maturity facilitating the achievement of the strategic objectives. The roadmap supports companies in evaluating the most appropriate technologies to overcome the internal inefficiencies identified hindering the achievement of the corporate results. The roadmap development process was studied from the extant literature and it has been applied in this contribution in a case study, specifically in an Italian company operating in the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) sector.