Digital Transformation of Electrical Engineering Companies in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Competitive yet sustainable production will be a real challenge for companies, especially in the current market conditions that have been affected by the covid-19 pandemic. In the future, if companies want to stay in the market and be competitive, they will have to adapt their production to requirements such as the Industry 4.0 concept, one of the benefits of which is to increase the productivity of companies and a relatively fast return on investment. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to find out the current status of enterprises in the electrical manufacturing sector in terms of implementing the Industry 4.0 concept. The findings were made through a questionnaire survey in which 50 companies from this sector participated. Surprisingly, the results of this survey showed that more than half of the respondents, despite all the possible benefits of the Industry 4.0 concept, are still not planning to implement it, while the remaining respondents are already in various stages of implementation. Moreover, although the Industry 4.0 concept has been discussed since 2011, the data showed that 20% of respondents are not familiar with the concept. The respondents who answered this way belonged to the group of micro or small enterprises, where this is understandable.