The impact of digital transformation on the adoption of analytical decision-making at strategic and operational level

In making strategic and operational decisions, firms can adopt an analytical or an intuitive approach. In this paper we want to investigate if there is any association between the decision making approach adopted by the firm and the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, at both levels of the decision making process. To this aim, we used PLS to analyse data collected from a panel of roughly 500 SMEs from Tuscany, Italy. Our findings for the operational decision making approach are in line with the framework proposed by Lu & Weng (2018), showing that SMEs adopting an analytical approach to operational decision making emphasize the coherence between technologies that transmit, elaborate and use data to improve their operations. Besides, our results show no significant differences in the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies between SMEs that adopt an analytic approach to strategic decision making and those that adopt an intuitive approach.