It’s been nearly a decade since the vision for Industry 4.0, the digitization of manufacturing, was announced. What progress have manufacturers made in the past ten years toward making this vision a reality? New research from Accenture Strategy suggests not nearly as much as they could have—or need to.

Digital maturity: From PoCs to scaling up

Digital maturity varies widely by industry. The most mature capabilities tend to be found where digital or data-driven solutions are critical to performance. Or they are found where there’s significant potential for productivity increases.

Digital maturity lags in industries where there’s little potential for productivity gains because operations are already lean. Or where digital for operations isn’t as high a priority as other concerns. For instance, highly efficient automotive OEMs today are focused on developing connected and electric cars. This is being done in place of digitizing their already automated assembly lines.

The digital maturity index enables us to evaluate the extent to which companies in our study were deploying the 40 key digital capabilities—from not started, to proofs of concepts (PoCs), to pilots, to scaling up, to fully deployed. | Image: Accenture