Increasing Firm Performance through Industry 4.0—A Method to Define and Reach Meaningful Goals

Industry 4.0 is one of the most influential trends in manufacturing as of now. Coined as the fourth industrial revolution it promises to overthrow entrenched structures opening new pathways for innovation and value creation. Like all revolutions, it is accompanied by disruption and uncertainty. Consequently, many manufacturing companies struggle to adopt an Industry 4.0 perspective that benefits their performance. Hence, our goal was to develop a method for increasing firm performance through Industry 4.0. A key factor was to focus on the entire company as a socio-technical system to depict the numerous interactions between people, technology, and business/organization. To realize the method, we combined consortium research, design science, and method engineering. We gathered comprehensive data from workshops, interviews, and five case studies, which we used to develop the method. It consists of four phases: a maturity model to determine the status quo, a procedure to derive a target position, a pattern-based approach to design the socio-technical system, and a procedure to define a transformation setup. Our approach is the first to combine maturity models with foresight and extensive prescriptive knowledge. For practitioners, the method gives orientation for the future-oriented planning of their transformation processes.