Factory Systems
Analytics cannot exceed its data. The honest maturity is the weakest layer, not the average of all of them.
— level
The weakest layer in the chain, which is what the plant can actually do
The constrained score is deliberately unforgiving and is the right default, but it is a bound rather than a description: a plant with excellent analytics and poor data capture is not literally at the data capture level in every respect, and some value is genuinely being extracted from the partial data that exists. Read the two scores as the range the plant sits inside and the overstatement as the size of the argument, not as a verdict. The dependency chain assumed here - capture, then connectivity, then integration, then analytics, then closed-loop automation - is the usual one and is not universal; a plant automating a single machine locally can close a loop without integrating anything, and where that is the shape the chain should be re-ordered before the minimum means anything. Weights only affect the average, which is the score this tool is arguing against, so they are supplied mainly so that an existing assessment can be reproduced and then challenged on its own numbers. The effort index is a crude ranking device - levels short multiplied by dimensions - and should not be read as cost, which depends far more on which layer is weak than on how many levels it is short. Data capture is usually the cheapest to fix and the one that unlocks everything above it.
Industry 4.0 Maturity: Weighted against Constrained — free, with the formula and a worked example, at Textile School.