Planning Guideline and Maturity Model for Intra-logistics 4.0 in SME

Abstract

Logistics systems have a key function to meet competition criteria like delivery time, punctuality or flexibility. Industry 4.0 technologies are considered as an important key to master increasing requirements like individualization, shorter product lifecycles or global competition. However, bringing the complex structures and processes of a logistics system to a higher level of maturity is not an easy endeavor. The actions to be planned and implemented need to be rooted in the overall digitalization strategy of the company. Furthermore, they need to be interlinked with the development of other corporate functions like production, quality or planning and they need to be based on current capabilities. To support such a systematic development process, maturity models seem to be the method of choice, and there is already a considerable amount of such models available. As those models are mainly focused on the company as a whole or specifically on production systems, we identified the need for a specific support for logistics. Therefore, in this paper we describe the relevant background as well as the components of a maturity model for an Intralogistics 4.0.