Maturity Assessments to Support SME Overcoming Structural Changes in Their Business Environment

With the increasing drive towards digitalization and automation, Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SME) face significant challenges in continuously adapting to their ever-changing business environment. Navigating those changes, including its technical, organizational and individual requirements, is hard for SME because they often do not have the necessary resources for a sufficient analysis and derivation of parameters for change. To support especially SME in positioning them to adapt to the ongoing and expected changes, the Fraunhofer IFF developed a flexible and customizable methodology to assess a company’s maturity level in different dimensions and start a road mapping process to subsequently increase the maturity level. In this way, companies are helped to individually meet the structural change resulting from various external challenges and the advent of Industry 4.0. Furthermore, SMEs are supported to successfully transformation. Maturity assessments proved very successful not only in developing concrete roadmaps for companies to increase their overall maturity, but also in shaping the necessary and underlying mindset to foster change. It was demonstrated that the maturity assessment methodology can be adapted in an international context. Additionally, the transfer of the methodology was piloted in a train-the-trainer concept with international trainees. These maturity assessments provide a significant contribution of the Fraunhofer IFF to the activities of the German Mittelstand Digital Initiative as well as the European Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) Initiative.