Digitization and Intangible Assets in Manufacturing Industries

Paper analyzes prospects for digitization in select manufacturing industries, those specifically studied in a recent consulting report. Beyond the conclusions of that report, this study looks more deeply into how digitization will be employed to enhance efficiency, the worker-data system interface and other expected outcomes. Through established metrics for assessing enterprise holdings of intangible assets such as data, knowledge, and intelligence, this paper more precisely identifies where and how digitization might be employed as well as the expected level of success. Overall, these industries are likely to see more incremental improvements in processes, mainly from successfully employing big data systems. Employee knowledge will likely be enhanced by digitization only slightly and mainly at the operational level. Major new insights from intelligence, especially at higher levels of these manufacturers, will likely be rare.