Safety Management in Accordance with Industry 4.0 Requirements: Analysis and Evaluation of the Level of Digitalization in the Slovak Companies

Abstract

Digitalization of industrial companies brings a lot of advantages for their management in the global entrepreneurial environment. Shortening of new product development, communication with customers already in their design phase, ‘early’ prevention of potential errors and discrepancies in processes, online status monitoring of important devices etc., enable to introduce effective management and meeting the stakeholders’ needs. However, these advantages are conditioned by applying the suitable tools for processing and evaluating data in core processes of an organization. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is a general term specifying the level of automation and digitalization implementation at the management of industrial as well as public activities within the advanced society. Protection of human in work environment in the EU has been implemented as Frame Directives for 30 years. Protection of property – intellectual property, its importance in today’s environment grows exponentially with the level of implemented digitalization. For this reason, it is important to apply such safety management tools, so that they enable a complex approach to the protection of physical but also intellectual property of an organization. The objective of the study was to find the real level of Industry 4.0 factors implementation and asses the status of complex safety in the selected industrial organizations in the Slovak republic. The form of questioning stemmed from the exceptionality model – EFQM. Basic parameters of the requirements resulting from the I4.0 factor analysis were created. The area of results was structured in such a way so that it is possible to prove the level of digitalization achievement and complex safety management in companies operating in Slovakia and their readiness for current trends in I4.0 and their development.