On Transforming into the Data-Driven Decision-Making Era - Current State of Practice in Manufacturing SMEs

Current research lacks details on how SMMEs are able to capitalize on how their IT-solutions supports data-driven decision-making. Such details are important for being able to support further development of SMMEs and assuring their sustainability and competitive edge. Prosperous SMMEs are vital due to their economical and societal importance. To alleviate the lack of details, this paper presents the results of four case studies towards SMMEs partly aimed at investigating their current state of data-driven decision-making. The findings reveal that IT-solutions in some areas are either underdeveloped or unexplored. Instead, the SMMEs tend to focus on traditional manufacturing techniques, continuous improvements in the manufacturing process, and manual support routines and thereby neglects opportunities offered in relation to e.g. incident management, product quality monitoring, and the usage of KPIs not directly linked to manufacturing.