Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125

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Computers in Industry
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compind

The degree of readiness for the implementation of Industry 4.0

Athos Paulo Tadeu Pacchini a , Wagner Cezar Lucato a,∗ , Francesco Facchini b ,
Giovanni Mummolo b
a
Industrial Engineering Post Garduation Program, Universidade Nove de Julho, São Paulo, Brazil
b
Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Industry 4.0 is causing significant changes in industrial sectors mainly in Europe, USA, and some countries
Received 21 May 2019 in Asia. Industry 4.0 is a set of disruptive digital and physical technologies that offer new values and
Received in revised form 15 August 2019 services to customers and organizations. In this study, we propose a model to measure the degree of
Accepted 9 September 2019
readiness of a manufacturing organization with regard to the implementation of Industry 4.0. Some
models have been proposed in the past to determine the degree of maturity of a company that measures
Keywords:
the progress made by the company in the implementation of Industry 4.0. However, no model has yet been
Industry 4.0
proposed that determines the degree of readiness of a company, which is an earlier step in the maturation
Degree of readiness
Maturity approach process. To develop the proposed model in this study, we employ a structure based on the Society of
Enabling technologies Automotive Engineers (SAE) J4000 standard for measuring the implementation of lean manufacturing in
Manufacturing a company; the model is duly modified to encompass Industry 4.0 principles and concepts. The proposed
model comprises eight technology enablers that are the most relevant based on existing literatures. The
real-world utilization of the proposed model is tested by an auto-parts manufacturing company in Brazil.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The literature review developed as part of this work found a

Industry 4.0 (I 4.0) has attracted relevant international interest
among manufacturers focused on technology (Zehl, 2016). In the
U.S., I 4.0 is commonly known as the Internet Industry of Things,
advanced manufacturing or smart manufacturing. Although the
term ‘intelligent industry’ was used in the U.S., it is now used across
the world in both industry and academia (Mittal et al., 2017).
According to Dilberoglu et al. (2017) and Mosterman and Zander
(2015), I 4.0 is an integrated set of intelligent production systems
and advanced information technologies that are based on sets of
integrated software systems. According to Guoping et al. (Guoping
et al., 2017), I 4.0 is a set of technologies based on the digitiza-
tion and interconnection of all production units present within an
economic system.
Drath and Horch (2014) stated that the development of I 4.0 is
now on a path with no return and will become a competitive chal-
lenge for companies interested in long-term survival with adequate
performance. Therefore, according to (Lee et al. (2014)), companies
in the current business environment must be prepared for this new
competitive challenge.
∗ Corresponding author at: Rua Vergeuiro, 249, 01504-001, São Paulo, Brazil.
E-mail address: wlucato@uni9.pro.br (W.C. Lucato).
considerable number of articles on I 4.0 maturity and/or readiness
evaluation models. Nevertheless, it should be noted that readiness
is different from maturity. (Schumacher et al. (2016)) expressed
the difference between these two concepts, placing the readiness
before the maturation process, i.e. the readiness shows if an organi-
zation is ready to start a development process. Maturity, in contrast,
shows a level of organization in relation to the analysed process.
Moreover, the Cambridge Dictionary (McIntosh, 2015) states that
readiness is the ‘willingness or a state of being prepared for some-
thing’ and maturity is ‘a very advanced or developed form or state’.
Additionally, the Oxford Dictionary (Stevenson, 2010) establishes
readiness as ‘the state of being fully prepared for something’ and
maturity as ‘the state, fact, or period of being mature’. Based on
what has been presented, this work adopts, as a definition of readi-
ness, the state in which an organization is ready to accomplish a
task, whereas maturity is defined as the level of evolution that an
organization has accomplished with respect to a task.
As stated before, the literature revealed several approaches for
evaluating the degree of maturity and/or readiness for I 4.0 imple-
mentation, as can be observed in Table 1.
Although some of these models have ‘readiness’ in their names,
none of them evaluate a readiness to implement I 4.0 under the
definition proposed by this work. According to Schumacher et al.
(2016), these models generally treat maturity and readiness as syn-

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2019.103125
0166-3615/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125

Table 1
Maturity and readiness models found in the literature.

Maturity and Readiness Models Authors

ACATECH Maturity Index Schuh et al. (2017)

The Singapore Smart Industry Readiness Index Basll and Doucek (2019)
IMPULS - Industrie 4.0 Readiness Lichtblau et al. (2015)
DREAMY - Digital Readiness Assessment Maturity Approach Mittal et al. (2018)
A maturity approach for assessing Industry 4.0 readiness and maturity of manufacturing enterprises. Schumacher et al. (2016)
SIMMI 4.0 – A Maturity Approach for Classifying the Enterprise-wide IT and Software Landscape Focusing on Industry 4.0 Leyh et al. (2016)
Industry 4.0: Building the digital enterprise. Sarvari et al. (2018)
Concept for an evolutionary maturity based Industrie 4.0 migration approach Stefan et al. (2018)
Three stage maturity model in SME’s towards Industry 4.0 Ganzarain and Errasti (2016)

Table 2
The I 4.0 enabling technologies according to the extant literature.

Number of citations of I 4.0 Enabling Technologies

Seq. Authors Technologies

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T

1 Ahuett-Garza and Kurfess (2018) X X X X X X

2 Guoping et al. (2017) X X X X X X X X X
3 Bortolini et al. (2017) X X X X X X X X X
4 Chhetri et al. (2017) X X X X X X X X X
5 CNI – Brazilian Confederation of X X X X X X X
Industries (2014)
6 Coelho (2016) X X X X
7 Dombrowski et al. (2017) X X X X X X X X X X X
8 Vaidya et al. (2018) X X X X X X X
9 Posada et al. (2015) X X X X X X X X X X X
10 Caiazzo (2018) X X X
11 Liu and Xu (2017) X X X X X X X X X X
12 Lu (2017) X X X X X X X
13 Pereira and Romero (2017) X X X X X X X
14 Roblek et al. (2016) X X X X X X X
15 Santos et al. (2017) X X X X X X X X X
16 Schmidt et al. (2015) X X X X X
17 Schwab (2016) X X X X X X X X X
18 Xu et al. (2018) X X X X X
19 Zhong et al. (2017) X X X X X
TOTAL 17 10 2 7 19 3 16 11 8 13 6 6 5 6 3 1 2 1 2 2

(A) Big data; (B) Autonomous robot; (C) Simulation; (D) Vert / Horz integration; (E) Internet of Things; (F) Cyber security; (G) Cloud computing; (H) Additive mfg.; (I)
Augmented reality; (J) Cyber-physical system; (K) RFID; (L) Artificial intelligence; (M) Service internet; (N) Mobile computing; (O) Intelligent material; (P) Smart factory; (Q)
TIC; (R) Location technologies; S) Autonomous vehicles; (T) M2M.

onyms, leaving the difference between the degree of maturity and
the degree of readiness undefined. This makes the measurement
of a degree of readiness (and not maturity) an interesting research
gap to be explored in this study.
Consequently, the present work aims to propose an approach to
measure the degree of readiness of a manufacturing organization in
relation to the implementation of I 4.0. This was performed using
a structure like the one employed by the Society of Automotive
Engineers (SAE) in J4000, i.e. ‘Measurement of the implementation
of lean manufacturing in an organization’. This structure was duly
modified to encompass the I 4.0 principles and concepts.
The remainder of this paper is structured to present a litera-
ture review, followed by a methods section and a description of the
proposed approach. Then, an example case study is presented to
demonstrate utilization of the approach in a real-world company,
followed by discussions and conclusions.
2. Theory review
The first step in establishing an approach to measure the degree
of readiness of a manufacturing organization to adopt I 4.0 com-
prises the identification of the technologies required to be in
place as a foundation to enable an adequate I 4.0 implementation.
These are the so-called ‘enabling technologies’. To identify them,
an exhaustive literature review was performed, and 19 articles
describing enabling technologies that encompass I 4.0 were iden-
tified. A summary of those papers is presented in Table 2. A simple
glimpse of the results reveals a significant lack of agreement among
the several authors regarding their opinions on this subject.
To select the most relevant qualifying technologies, those most-
frequently cited in the literature were considered to support this
work. For this purpose, an ABC classification concept was used
to generate the following list of enabling technologies: big data,
‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), cloud computing, autonomous robots,
additive manufacturing, cyber physical systems, and augmented
reality. Each one can be summarised as follows:
• IoT - Technology that provides connectivity between sensors,
machines, and mobile and human devices, allowing for the inter-
nal and external interoperability of organizations, and making
data more accessible and ubiquitous (Ahuett-Garza and Kurfess,
2018).
• Big data - An environment in which a large amount of unstruc-
tured, structured, and semi-structured data is stored, arriving
from various sources and connected through the IoT, so as to pro-
vide accurate and fast information for decision-making (Vaidya
et al., 2018).
• Cloud computing - A generic term that denotes remote access
with an extremely fast response to data stored in an external
environment, through the IoT (Zhong et al., 2017).
• Cyber physical system - Systems that combine statistics and
computational approaching with real-time data extracted from
 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125
physical systems, to approach the response of a structure under
various scenarios, with the goal of indicating the best deci-
sion. In fact, they are transforming technologies for managing
systems interconnected between physical and computational
resources, by leveraging the interconnectivity of intelligent,
resilient, and self-adaptive machines (Ahuett-Garza and Kurfess,
2018; Alharthi et al., 2017; Mazzei and Noble, 2017; Cervone,
2016).
• Autonomous robot - They are intelligent, flexible, and coopera-
tive robots. Eventually, they will interact with each other and
work safely side-by-side with humans, learning from them and
deciding for themselves (Guoping et al., 2017).
• Additive manufacturing - This technology, also known as 3D print-
ing, can produce small batches of custom products that offer
building advantages, such as in the design of complex parts
(Posada et al., 2015). The process comprises depositing a material
layer-upon-layer (Caiazzo, 2018).
• Augmented reality - This technology expands information in the
environment surrounding a human, allowing the human to inter-
act with virtual objects that co-exist simultaneously with a
physical environment in a virtual way, in the same space of the
real environment (Vaidya et al., 2018).
To confirm the adequacy of these technologies as enablers of
I 4.0, they were presented to four experts on the subject: one
from Academia (PhD in Operations Management and professor
at Politecnico di Bari – Italy – involved with I 4.0 research), one
from industry (Mechanical Engineer with more than 20 years of
experience in auto parts manufacturing, now responsible for I 4.0
implementation in a Brazilian subsidiary of a large European auto
parts producer), one from Government (MSc in Information Sys-
tems and currently the I 4.0 coordinator at the Brazilian Ministry of
Industrial Development and Trade) and one from an I 4.0 consult-
ing company (PhD in Electrical Engineering and leading consultant
for I 4.0 implementation at a large multinational consulting com-
pany with subsidiary in Brazil). They unanimously agreed with the
above selections, but indicated that artificial intelligence should be
also included in the list of enabling technologies used in this work.
Hence, an eighth technology was added, as follows:
• Artificial intelligence - This technology represents, rationalises,
and manages knowledge. To be intelligent, systems must be able
to recognise the context of the environment where they are
deployed, and to decide in real time what to do in the given
situation to achieve the proposed goal (Chun et al., 2019).
However, to determine the degree of readiness, it is necessary
to evaluate to what extent these enabling technologies are imple-
mented in a given company. For that reason, this work reviewed the
extant literature to identify the prerequisites for each of the eight
enablers mentioned above. This search revealed that the number
of prerequisites varied from a minimum of 6 to a maximum of 8,
per enabler. To adopt an identical number of prerequisites for all
seven of the enabling technologies, this work chose a standard of 6,
and eliminated the least-relevant ones (i.e. those from the enablers
showing 7 or 8 pre-requisites).
Owing to space constraints, all of the 48 chosen prerequisites
are not presented here. Nevertheless, as an example, the six pre-
requisites selected for the enabler ‘big data’ were: a) the company
should have infrastructure for digital systems; b) the company
should have all of its data/information organised and maintained
in secure digital systems; c) the company should have a communi-
cation network for the large amount of data traffic; d) the company
should have personnel empowered to organise and collect data; e)
the company should treat big data at the strategic level; and f) the
company should know the problems to be solved with the obtained
3
data (Alharthi et al., 2017; Mazzei and Noble, 2017; Cervone, 2016;
Günther et al., 2017; Yoo et al., 2018).
3. Methods
This work proposes a conceptual approach for evaluating the
degree of readiness of a manufacturing company to adopt I 4.0
principles and practices. Therefore, it can be methodologically cat-
egorised as a conceptual paper, where a literature review on I 4.0
technologies and their respective prerequisites are complemented
by theoretical work and a practical example to support the recom-
mended framework (Bryman, 1995;Collins and Hussey, 2007).
3.1. Approach development
The approach for measuring the readiness of an industry for the
adoption of I 4.0 is based on a proposed standard that allows indus-
trial companies to evaluate how prepared they are to reach that goal
and, simultaneously, to identify areas of opportunity for the devel-
opment of actions that position them in a more favourable way. By
being consistent with the comparison between the ideal conditions
and the current situation of the company and by considering each
of the enabling technologies as well as their prerequisites, is pos-
sible to identify the managerial actions that improve a company’s
degree of readiness.
The proposed approach was inspired by a structure such as
that developed by the SAE to identify and measure best practices
for the implementation of lean manufacturing in companies (SAE,
2001). SAE J4000 considers six elements for the implementation of
lean manufacturing, representing areas of a company in which lean
practices will be evaluated. To estimate the degree of adoption of
each of these elements in a company, the standard establishes a set
of components for each element. These are statements that seek to
identify the relevant aspects of lean implementation in relation to
each element considered.
This evaluation is performed by identifying four possible
answers to each statement: Level 0 (L0) - the component is not
present or there are major inconsistencies in its implementation;
Level 1 (L1) - the component is present, but there are minor incon-
sistencies in its implementation; Level 2 (L2) – the component is
present and implemented; and Level 3 (L3) - the component is fully
present.
Thus, to determine the degree of implementation of a compo-
nent in a company, information is gathered to facilitate determining
which of the four levels (L0, L1, L2, or L3) best describes the current
situation of the component. Therefore, if in the evaluation of the
company, the researcher concludes that L1 is the statement that
best describes the observed situation, it can be said that for that
particular component, the degree of implementation will be L1.
As previously mentioned, this work uses a structure similar to
that SAE J4000/4001 as a basis for developing an approach to mea-
sure the readiness degree. To do so, each element of the original
SAE standard is associated with one of the eight identified enabling
I 4.0 technologies. Thus, each enabling technology (element) will
comprise a set of ‘m’ prerequisites associated with the components
of the SAE standard. In addition, in line with SAE J4000, 4 levels of
adoption are used to measure the degree of adoption of these pre-
requisites, as follows: Level 0 (L0) - the prerequisite is not present
in the analysed company; Level 1 (L1) - the prerequisite exists but
is incompletely implemented; Level 2 (L2) - The prerequisite exists
and is almost fully-implemented; and Level 3 (L3) - the requirement
is fully-implemented.
In this way, all of the prerequisites of I 4.0 associated with each
enabling technology will be verified in the company being sur-
veyed. As an example, assume that big data is one of the identified
4 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125
Table 3
Readiness degree status.
Degree of Readiness (DR ) - % Status
0 ≤ DR < 10 Embryonic
10 ≤ DR < 25 Initial
25 ≤ DR < 50 Primary
50 ≤ DR < 75 Intermediate
75 ≤ DR < 90 Advanced
90 ≤ DR ≤ 100 Ready
enabling technologies (as above). In such a case, the big data ele-
ment could comprise, as prerequisites, different components (e.g.
infrastructure for digital system, information organised in digital
system). Therefore:
e.g. Enabling technology: Big data
e.1. The company should have infrastructure for digital systems
• L0. The company has no infrastructure for digital systems.
• L1. The company has a small infrastructure for digital systems.
• L2. The company has a medium infrastructure for digital systems.
• L3. The company has complete infrastructure for digital systems.
e.2. The company should have all its data/information organised
and maintained in digital secure systems (DSS)
• L0. The company does not have its information organised and
maintained in DSS.
• L1. The company has some information organised and maintained
in DSS.
• L2. The company has a large part of its information organised and
maintained in DSS.
L3. The company has all of its information organised and main-
tained in DSS.
To measure the readiness degree of a company in relation to an
enabling technology, we propose determining its level of adoption
using a development proposed by Lucato et al. (Lucato et al., 2019).
Hence, to measure the adoption of a component, this work proposes
associating each implementation level with a certain number of
points, as follows: L0 – 0 points, L1 – 1 point, L2 – 2 points, and L3
– 3 points. As a result, based on Lucato et al. (Günther et al., 2017),
the degree of readiness of a given element ‘n’ can be calculated by
dividing the actual number of total points obtained in its evaluation
by the sum of the maximum of points possible for the element.
Thus:

points obtained as a result of evaluation of components of element e
gn =
Maximum poits possible
As an example to clarify the proposed calculation, consider
the following for element 2, comprising six prerequisites (compo-
nents): 2.1 – L2; 2.2 – L1; 2.3 – L1; 2.4 – L0; 2.5 – L3 and 2.6 – L2. The
degree of readiness for such an element (g2 ) can be determined as
follows:
2+1+1+0+3+2 9
g2 = = = 0.500 or 50, 0%
3+3+3+3+3+3 18
The calculation demonstrates that this company has a degree of
readiness with respect to technology enabler 2 (element 2) equal to
0.500 out of a maximum of 1.000 (in which for all six components
of element 2, the resulting evaluation would be L3). It would also
be possible to state that in relation to technology enabler 2, the
company meets only 50.0% of the required prerequisites.
So far, the approach proposed herein has measured the degree of
adoption of the prerequisites for a given technology. Nevertheless,
it remains to reach the objective of this work, which is to propose
a way to measure the degree of readiness of a company. For this,
assume that there is a need to determine the degree of readiness of
Characteristics
The company has some superficial knowledge of a small number of enabling technologies (if any).
The company has some knowledge of some technologies but may not know all of them.
The company has a good knowledge of all technologies, but not all of them have already been adopted.
The company has full knowledge of all technologies and all them have already begun to be adopted.
The company has full knowledge of all technologies and all them have a high degree of adoption
The company has practically all the enabling technologies in full degree of maximum adoption.
an industrial company for the adoption of I 4.0. Let t1 , t2 , t3 , t4 , . . ..,
tn be the ‘n’ enabling technologies considered. It is assumed that
for each of these technologies, the respective degrees of adoption
of the prerequisites have been determined. They can be denoted
as: g1 , g2 , g3 , . . .., gn . If all of the technology enablers have the same
importance, it can be considered that the respective contribution
of the degree of adoption of a given technology (gm ) to the degree
of readiness of the company is:

6
Li
g 1
Dt n = m rn = (2)
n 18
In the above:
Dtn – contribution of the degree of adoption of technology ‘m’
to the degree of readiness of the company;
gm – degree of adoption of technology enabler ‘m’; and
n – total number of technology enablers considered.
This condition is repeated for all ‘n’ technologies, each giving its
respective contribution to the formation of the degree of readiness
of the company as a whole, i.e.:
DR = Dt 1 + Dt 2 + Dt 3 + · · · + Dt n (3)
or:

n
gm
g + g2 + g3 + · · · + gn 1
DR = 1 = (4)
n n
Here: DR = degree of readiness of a given company;
g1 = degree of adoption of enabling technology 1;
g2 = degree of adoption of enabling technology 2; and
gn = degree of adoption of enabling technology n.
To provide a better understanding of the results obtained by the
(1) foregoing calculations, we used the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO)/ International Electrotechnical Commission
(IEC) 15504-5 standard (good practices of software engineering)
(ISO and ISO/IEC 15504-5, 2004) as a basis for proposing six lev-
els of sequential and cumulative metrics, to evaluate how well an
organization is prepared to implement I 4.0. They are presented in
Table 3.
In that regard, the results can be expressed as a radar graph,
where each axis represents one enabling technology and illustrates
its respective degree of adoption. In addition, a scale of colours
can reinforce this presentation, as shown in Fig. 1. In this case,
each colour represents a certain degree of adoption for an enabling
technology. For instance, a low degree of adoption of a certain
technology is represented by red and orange. For a high degree of
adoption, green and blue are used. In the middle, yellow is adopted.
Thus, when the complete radar graph is drawn, the bluer/greener
the graph is, the higher the degree of readiness of the company
being analysed. In contrast, the redder /more orange the graph is,
the less prepared the company is to start its implementation of I
4.0.
 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125
Fig. 1. A graphical example of a company considering “n” enabling technologies.
4. Case study
To show how the proposed approach could be applied in a
real-world situation, a case study was developed. The company
selected for this study was a multinational diesel engine manu-
facturer located in the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This company
supplies its products to most truck and bus producers in the coun-
try, in addition to other applications such as stationary engines for
generators and maritime propulsion units. It has been in operation
in Brazil for more than 50 years, and employs approximately 1200
persons.
To get the information required to support this work, a semi-
structured interview was conducted. Two company employees
attended a meeting with the researchers: the manufacturing direc-
tor, and the advanced manufacturing engineering manager, who is
responsible for I 4.0 development and implementation. The inter-
viewees initially mentioned that in terms of I 4.0, the company is
seriously considering implementing many of the I 4.0 principles
and technologies as part of its manufacturing strategy. However,
there are several prerequisites that need to be developed.
After several discussions regarding the I 4.0 importance, difficul-
ties, and implementation issues that are not part of this work, the
researchers specifically discussed the degree of adoption of each
one of the eight enabling technologies. A summary of the obtained
results is shown in Table 4.
An analysis of the results presented in Table 4 enables some
interesting conclusions. First, the degree of readiness of this diesel
engine manufacturing company is 0.7569, or 75.7%. This means that
5
the company has 75.7% of the technologies in place that are required
to support an adequate I 4.0 implementation. However, we need to
clarify the interpretation of these results. This calculation is not
measuring how many/how much of the I 4.0 practices have been
adopted by the researched firm. This would be the degree of matu-
rity. It is evaluating how much or many of the pre-requisites of
each of the I 4.0 enabling technologies are present in the company
(degree of readiness). Therefore, the 75% calculated here repre-
sents that 75% of all I 4.0 prerequisites are currently being met.
This positions this company in an advanced stage of maturity for
implementing I 4.0. In fact, this company is already employing some
initial I 4.0 initiatives and adopting some practices, although in a
preliminary and unintegrated way (very low maturity level).
In that regard, the technology in which the company is best posi-
tioned to support I 4.0 adoption is in the additive manufacturing,
where all of the prerequisites are fully met (r6 = 1 or 100%). Con-
versely, the technology where the most effort will be required to
prepare for a proper I 4.0 implementation is that of collaborative
(autonomous) robots, as the degree of adoption of this technol-
ogy is only 0.4444 or 44.4%. Evidently, the company management
could analyse what remains missing in terms of fully meeting
the collaborative robots’ prerequisites. This analysis could then be
used generate specific plans for managing the requirements for
improving the degree of adoption of that technology. Fig. 2 shows
a graphical representation of the readiness degree of the stud-
ied manufacturing company, where the colours are in line with
those previously explained in this work. Therefore, it is possible
to note that the prevailing colours are green, yellow, and blue,
6 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125

Table 4
The degree of readiness of the company under study.

Degree of adoption of each pre-requisite

Enabling Technologies 1 2 3 4 5 6 rn (Eq.1)

1 Internet of Things 2 2 3 3 3 2 0,8333

2 Big Data 1 3 3 0 3 3 0,7222
3 Cloud Computing 3 2 2 3 3 3 0,8889
4 Cyber Physical Systems 3 2 2 2 2 1 0,6667
5 Collaborative Robots 1 3 3 1 0 0 0,4444
6 Additive Manufacturing 3 3 3 3 3 3 1,0000
7 Augmented Reality 3 2 2 3 1 3 0,7778
8 Artificial Intelligence 3 1 2 2 2 3 0,7222
Degree of Readiness of the Company (Eq. 3) 0,7569

Fig. 2. Area of the readiness degree of the manufacturing company studied.

which positions the degree of readiness of this company is in the
intermediate+/advanced range.
5. Discussion and conclusion
The proposed model closes some gaps identified in the theory.
First, it evaluates the degree of readiness of a manufacturing com-
pany for the implementation of I 4.0 as opposed to evaluating the
I 4.0 maturity level, which has already been extensively studied in
the past. In addition, it provides managers with a tool for identifying
points to be implemented to better position their companies to face
the challenges posed by I 4.0 implementation. This overcomes the
limitations observed in the maturity models presented in Table 1.
Consequently, the proposed model contributes to both theory and
practical application. On the theoretical side, this study proposes a
novel and innovative model for evaluating the degree of readiness
of a manufacturing company for the implementation of I 4.0, which
has not been thoroughly studied in the past. On the practical side,
the model provides a user-friendly tool for managers to identify
actions needed to improve the degree of readiness of their compa-
 A.P.T. Pacchini, W.C. Lucato, F. Facchini et al. / Computers in Industry 113 (2019) 103125
nies for adequately preparing them for the implementation of I 4.0
principles and practices. Moreover, they will be able to identify the
prerequisites of each enabling technology that need to be worked
on to improve the degree of readiness of their companies.
This study also has some limitations. First, the proposed
model relies on eight enabling technologies. Although different
researchers can consider a more diverse set or quantity of enablers,
the integrity of the developed model is retained. The essential
aspects remain the same, and some small adjustments in the cal-
culations can solve this issue. The same can be said in relation
to the number and content of the prerequisites for each tech-
nology. Likewise, minor modifications to the proposed model can
easily accommodate this situation. Some readers can also argue
that the enabling technologies cannot have the same impact as
far as I 4.0 implementation is concerned. In addition, the inter-
relations among enabling technologies can, in principle, affect the
degree of readiness. Nevertheless, these were not a part of our study
that aimed at establishing a theoretical and generic way to evalu-
ate the degree of readiness of a company for the implementation
of I 4.0. Therefore, those aspects can be considered as sugges-
tions for future research by involving specific studies to address
those points. Finally, the application of the proposed model con-
sidered only one manufacturing company because the case study
only aimed at demonstrating the approach in operation in one
real-world situation. We recommend the utilization of the pro-
posed model in several other manufacturing firms to validate its
use in
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Research Backing Fund from
UNINOVE – Universidade Nove de Julho and the National Coun-
cil for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ) grant
#303661/2016-0 for providing the financial support needed to
develop this work.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in
the online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2019.
103125.
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