The adoption of digital technologies in the manufacturing world and their evaluation: A systematic review of real-life case studies and future research agenda

In the last decade, digitalization has transformed industrial systems worldwide and digital technologies have increasingly been implemented in many different ways in the manufacturing sector. Despite the large number of theoretical investigations in this field, there is still a lack of clarity regarding the cost-benefit analysis of the adoption of digital technologies in manufacturing. In addition, the majority of the literature reviews published in the last years do not focus on real-life case studies of digital technologies implementation. This review makes a unique selection of 229 case studies and categorize them according to four main dimensions: the different types of applied digital technologies, their level of application within the industrial layout, the performance mea-surement of digital technologies and the economic benefit analysis of their implementation. Five new research directions emerge as a result of this work.