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Digitalization is widely accepted as a principal technological strategy and is expected to vastly impact and transform industry, predominantly by a substantial improvement of the entire value chain. However, its implementation process remains slow, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as they tend to have misconceptions about the complexity and expense of digitalization. The purpose of this research is to analyze factors that affect Brandenburg-State, DEU SMEs in their decision making process for an effective implementation of digital technologies in their daily business routine. The results of this study are based on a survey that was conducted in cooperation with fifty SMEs, which currently face problems in the areas of enterprise resource planning (ERP), CAD/CAM, automation, logistics and production/factory planning. Ten of these SMEs have decided to invest in digitalization measures and started the implementation process. Three of them were chosen for the case study to evaluate potential benefits, trade-offs and barriers hampering the implementation of digitalization technologies. These three companies are considered representative items, since their needs and measures investigated were identical to most of the companies of this survey. It was found that the overwhelming majority of the companies regard ERP implementation as their highest priority when investing in the most cost-effective technology.
Kilimis et al. (Tue,) studied this question.