Industry 4.0 assessment in agri-food and dairy sector: a literature review of Maturity Models

The agri-food industry and the dairy industry are undergoing a profound transformation due to the spread of new digital technologies. This digital transition is pushing for the use of enabling technologies indicated by the new Industry 4.0 paradigms, impacting on how companies typically provide their goods and services. Although companies are aware of the potential benefits of this transition, they have tackled the required task of adapting or reshaping their existing processes to the new era of digitalization. To do that, proper and accurate digital maturity models (MM) should be developed aiming at defining roadmaps to assist organizations in Industry 4.0 adoption. These models are necessary to both verify the technological level and to define the starting point of a path that can lead to an effective digital transition of manufacturing. The concept of MM has been widely investigated in literature, especially for medium and large companies while limited studies have been focused on its implementation in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) context. Indeed, SMEs exhibit substantial constraints in terms of limited financial and human resources which may hinder the roadmaps adoption developed for large organizations making the definition of the Design Principles a complex and tailored task. This work proposes a critical review of the extant literature on MMs for the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in the SMEs context with emphasis on the food processing sector. Having realised the absence of specific MMs for the dairy industry, the main purpose is to identify, among the MMs currently available in the literature, the ones that can more effectively be adapted for the digital level assessment of companies operating in that sector. Results highlight how employing the MMs typically applied for manufacturing organizations may be a valuable tool for addressing the specific needs of the dairy industry.