Digital transformation in maintenance: interoperability-based adequacy aiming smart legacy systems

Abstract

Paper aims: The Industry 4.0 movement highlights the importance of information and communication technologies and the two main reasons for this are advances in digitalization and automation. However, organizations trying to implement technologies face several barriers in their systems. These barriers are intensified in legacy systems, tightly coupled to organizational processes. Thus, to overcome these barriers, an adequacy strategy was structured, and detailed in the context of interoperability. Originality: This article proposes a digital transformation framework focused on interoperability in maintenance systems. Research method: Aiming to make legacy systems work together with cyber-physical systems, the proposed framework suggests its suitability based on strategic decisions, using Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods. Main findings: The framework outputs demonstrate that people are the main drivers of digital transformation and that the strategies proposed by it are coherent with the actual development of both cases, proven in a new interview one year apart from its application. Implications for theory and practice: Real industrial cases demonstrate that the framework can guarantee interoperability while facilitating strategic decisions to implement technologies in legacy maintenance systems. In the end, the legacy system, which will interoperate with the new technologies, is called Smart Legacy System.