Industrial digitalisation and Industry 4.0 among maintenance professionals in small and medium-sized enterprises

Today, industrial digitalization and Industry 4.0 play an extremely important role as an innovation orientation for automotive manufacturing companies. This trend has only been reinforced by the COVID pandemic. Hungarian industrial players have an essential interest to reach a high level of development in keeping with the era and to be at the forefront of digitalization. However, the previous studies of the authors have shown that Hungarian SMEs, especially domestically owned ones, have encountered significant difficulties in this development path. In this paper, these reasons are explored by analyzing the views of automotive maintenance professionals using different methods.