Digital investment for manufacturers: a literature review of challenges and good practices – report

Although the importance of digitalisation as a critical source of innovation and competitiveness among manufacturers is widely accepted, manufacturers struggle to make the necessary investments to capture these opportunities. To support manufacturers with their digitalisation journey, it is critical to develop a detailed understanding of the digital investment challenges manufacturers are facing and how they can be overcome.

This report provides the findings of a systematic review of the academic and grey literature carried out to establish the state of the art on what is known on the diverse organisational, technical and process challenges manufacturers are facing with their investment into digitalisation and the good practices that are available to address them. It also evaluates the current theoretical contributions and gaps in the existing literature to develop a research agenda to help researchers target and accelerate their future investigations on the digitalisation of the manufacturing industry.

This research was conducted by Dr Andreas Schroeder, Dr Yang Zhao and Dr Daniel Andrews of Aston University.