On Tuesday, January 21, the first working session was held with which the Barometer of the Digital Transformation of Industry in Catalonia was launched, an initiative that aims to characterize and diagnose the degree of digitalization of Catalan industry, identifying opportunities for improvement and actions that allow the acceleration of digital transformation in the industrial sector.

The project is part of the Initiatives to strengthen competitiveness for the year 2024 of ACCIÓ (IRC 2024) and is promoted by the Digital Cluster, Market AAD, AETech, Bee2be Tech, Acceleralia and the MAV Cluster.

A roadmap for Catalan industry

The workshop was held in person in Barcelona and, for two hours, eight leading companies with profiles clearly linked to the digital-industrial ecosystem, debated the current state of the industry's digitalization. Representatives from AETECH, BEE2BE TECH, DRIBIA, EURECAT, T-SYSTEMS, COPA-DATA, BESTPLANT and MIRMIT shared their views on four essential axes for the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry: strategy, digital talent, production and management.

Towards a representative Barometer

This first group session allowed us to obtain direct information and a detailed diagnosis on key aspects of digitalization through the testimony of 8 digital companies with extensive experience in the industry; but this is only the beginning of a process that will allow us to offer a detailed radiograph of the sector and propose concrete solutions to face the challenges of digitalization.

Over the next few months, quantitative fieldwork will be carried out through a questionnaire to industrial companies in Catalonia, as well as qualitative interviews with representatives of the country's industrial sector to learn about their digitalization process, challenges, experiences and success stories.

The results of the Barometer will be publicly presented at an event to be held at the end of April 2025. This event, aimed at both companies and entities in the industrial demand sector and companies and organizations in the digital supply sector, as well as the Public Administration. The aim is to consolidate this event as an annual benchmark and a tool with real impact on the territory and the industrial fabric, promoting synergies and contributing to the development of the sector.

In addition, the project envisages the creation of a technological platform that will offer a benchmarking tool aimed at industrial companies with the aim of being able to evaluate their digital level against the aggregate results of the Barometer and, at the same time, to get closer to the ecosystem of digital companies. The barometer will be updated periodically with new data and suggestions based on the trends and needs of the sector.

Diagnosis of industrial digitalization

With this initiative, the Cluster will launch an instrument that will allow characterizing and diagnosing the degree of digitalization of the entire industry in Catalonia in order to identify those areas of improvement and opportunities for all industrial companies in the country to undertake and accelerate digital transformation processes in their sector. The identification of these areas of improvement must serve to connect the possibilities of intervention of the digital ecosystem and its companies, through solutions specific to the state of the art of the sector and, therefore, accelerate, monitor and demonstrate (with tangible metrics) the competitive advantages of this intervention.

To achieve this objective, the Digital Cluster of Catalonia, which coordinates the project, has MAV Cluster (to allow for a unique vision of the industrial field), MarketAAD (a company specialized in the dynamization of industrial ecosystems and with more than 40 years of experience in market research in Catalonia), AETECH (expert in industrial automation and process digitalization), Bee2Be Tech (a consultant focused on connecting the digital ecosystem with the manufacturing industry, accompanying them in their digitalization process) and Acceleralia (which will be responsible for creating the technological platform and monitoring the results).