The Smart Manufacturing Organizational Capability Model: a framework for assessing change-execution and sustainment capability across firm sizes

Abstract

Industry survey evidence indicates that under a third of manufacturers are scaling smart factory initiatives across the enterprise, and that a large majority cannot scale digital innovation across their manufacturing networks. Two failure modes underline these figures. Initiatives may never escape pilot stage. Alternatively they scale successfully and then lose realized value in the months after deployment. The second is less studied than the first, although it consumes investment already committed.

Both failures are organizational rather than technical, and the maturity literature has responded by adding organizational dimensions to instruments that were previously technology focused. This paper argues that the organizational category so constructed contains two constructs rather than one. Steady-state operational capability concerns how well an organization runs what it already has. Change-execution capability concerns whether it can deploy something new, retain the ability to operate it, absorb the disruption of adopting it, and confirm that projected value survived. Existing instruments assess the first. None assess the second.

The Smart Manufacturing Organizational Capability Model (SM-OCM) is a five-dimension, five-stage framework addressing change-execution and sustainment capability, specified to hold across the size distribution of the manufacturing base. Constructs are stated independently of organization scale. The evidence demonstrating a construct at a given stage is banded by firm size, so that a forty-person manufacturer and a seventy-site enterprise are assessed on the same capabilities against conditions appropriate to their scale. Sixty capability evidence criteria are specified in full.