Organizational Barriers Towards Industry 4.0

In the last decade, researchers have given particular attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), also known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), due to its potential to improve internal processes efficiency, real-time control of their supply chains and boost competitiveness of companies regardless of their industry and size. Even agricultural sector has been experiencing a transformation leading to automation and abandonment of traditional practices. Entities willing to embrace and enjoy the benefits of 4IR need to adapt to it. Those stuck with usual business and processes risk to be inadequate for a changing environment and misfit it: they are likely to run out of business. The 4IR represents an opportunity for companies as they can increase their profits and monitor their value chain entirely. However, challenges and obstacles more or less difficult to surmount can impede and slow down the digitalization introduced by 4IR. These hurdles are of different nature ranging from strategic, human resources and operational. Operational barriers are the focus of the present paper. Through the means of a questionnaire filled out by owners and employees with managerial and non-managerial functions it was investigated (among the others) what are in order of importance the perceived main barriers of this category that obstacle them from becoming highly digitalized and complete the digitalization process. The sample comprises Slovak and Italian companies from different industries and of diverse characteristics. The survey showed that data security and financial availability are perceived to be the most important barriers of the operational barriers.