Setting the Hook – The Digital Transformation from a Manufacturing Point of View and what it Really Means

The digital transformation is gaining momentum. During February 2019, Google has received twenty-five times as many search requests for digital transformation as five years earlier. This inflationary upsurge is accompanied by an ever-increasing blurring of the context the term is supposed to address as well as of the definition itself. In this paper, we tackle that problem from a manufacturing point of view by conducting a systematic literature review. As a result, we present an industry-tailored three-layer definition for the phenomenon. Furthermore, we identify 30 technological concepts that are considered as digital transformation-related in that context. Divided into eleven clusters, we embed them into a framework outlining the digital transformation in the manufacturing environment