Identifying key objectives when going through a Digital Transformation - An Extensive Study within the mining industry

Sammanfattning: Digital technologies and their significance to society have caused their existence and impact to be referred to as entailing a digital revolution. For businesses, digitalization is the use of digital technologies to create new business models and value-adding activities. The use of digital technologies can in turn result in possible improvements in several areas e.g., productivity. The possible outcomes entail a new playing field for profit-driven companies who all have the common denominator to constantly maintain a competitive edge. To fully utilise the digital technologies, businesses need to take actions in the organization to embrace new services and streamlined processes from the use of digital technologies, with other words go through a digital transformation. The purpose of this master thesis was to describe and analyse production processes to identify key objectives for a company going through a digital transformation. In a digital transformation, many organizational areas need to interplay with the intended use of digital technologies, this study focused on investigating production processes to contribute with key objectives within this area for a company going through a digital transformation. The purpose was intended to be satisfied with the help of two theoretical models. The first to describe and visualize the production processes, the other to analyse the digital readiness of the production processes and to extract key objectives to go through with the transformation. The research purpose was both descriptive and exploratory and to fulfil the purpose, a case study was used to investigate one production process at the case company. The research method was qualitative which can be reflected in the data collection approach that was conducted through interviews and observations as well as archive analysis on documents received from the case company. From the results and analysis, it became clear that the theoretical model used to describe the production process, value-based process modelling, was an efficient tool to both get a comprehensive view of the process and its activities as well as a basis for in-depth descriptions of each activity. Furthermore, the second model, IMPULS, was adjusted to fit the purpose of this study. The resulting digital readiness of the case company process was of a “Learner”. Furthermore, by combining the two theoretical models, the key objectives in production processes for a Learner were identified for the company to go through a digital transformation. These were to understand the full potential of collected data and use it optimally; enable full potential of equipment by integration; and to simplify and improve the flow of information.