Does the industrial big data environment matter? An evaluation of its effect on the production performance

Abstract

The widespread deployment of the Internet of Things has created a brand-new digital environment—an industrial big data environment (IBDE) characterized by a multitude of data resources. This study posits that IBDE, which has been commonly neglected in previous research, not only incubates affordance awareness capability, but also incurs data debt (DD), a new type of technical debt. This study uses affordances of manufacturing, manufacturing agility, and manufacturing excellence, together with DD, to parse the mechanism about how IBDE influences the enterprise production performance. We hypothesize that these three mediators are in charge of transmitting the influence of the munificent IBDE on the production performance. Empirical results confirm that IBDE significantly influences the three mediators, which in turn exert significant effects on the production performance. As such, we validate the existence of the mediating effect, and the significance of IBDE on the actions of affordance actualization. Further, despite the overall positive effect of the mediators on performance, the adverse influence of DD nevertheless cannot be neglected. These findings remind enterprises that a balanced development strategy of digital environment is imperative in terms of actualization of the affordances.