13 Migration Strategies towards the Digital Manufacturing Automation

Today, industries are facing new market demand and customer requirements for higher product personalization, without jeopardizing the low level of production costs achieved through mass production. The joint pursuit of these objectives of personalization and competitiveness on costs is quite difficult for manufacturers that have traditional production systems based on centralized automation architectures. Centralized control structures, in fact, do not guarantee the system adaptability and flexibility required to achieve increasing product variety at shorter time-to-market. In order to avoid business failure, industries need to quickly adapt their production systems and migrate towards novel production systems characterized by digitalization and robotization. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate a methodological approach to migration that supports decision makers in addressing the transformation. The approach encompasses the initial assessment of the current level of manufacturing digital maturity, the analysis of priorities based on the business strategy, and the development of a migration strategy. Specifically, this chapter presents an innovative holistic approach to develop a migration