The Data-Driven Process Improvement Cycle: Using Digitalization for Continuous Improvement

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is the first industrial revolution to be announced a priori, and there is thus a significant ambiguity surrounding the term and what it actually entails. This paper aims to clearly define digitalization, a key enabler of Industry 4.0, and illustrate how it can be used for improvement through proposing an improvement cycle and an associated digitalization typology. These tools can be used by organizations to guide improvement processes, focusing on the new possibilities introduced by the enormous amounts of data currently available. The usage of the tools is illustrated by presenting four scenarios from Kanban control, where each scenario is mapped according to their digitalization level.