Industry 4.0 Maintenance: An Examination of the Readiness of Germany's Industrial Sector

Abstract

The initiative Industry 4.0 of the German government leaves open and raises questions about its practical realization. We examine the state of development, represented by the analysis of its related maintenance sector of manufacturing companies. While previous surveys focused primarily on technical barriers, this study takes a broader look. Beside technical aspects of Industry-4.0-ready change management, we added a psychological perspective. This enables both, a solid understanding of the technical status of the Industry 4.0 development and to obtain information on the psychological status of the involved employees. Our results reveal a technically limited state of development in Germany manufacturing companies regarding the use of modern data-based analysis. Further, it shows that there is a strong barrier by employees to drive the necessary change. However, our results highlight that in particular an increased system transparency of intelligent systems can initiate such an improvement.