Digitalization is increasingly gaining interest among manufacturers. Focusing on manufacturing, this interest already turned into a necessity that cannot be further postponed. This explains why digitalization or Industry 4.0 transition characterizes most of strategies for manufacturers irrespectively of their size or maturity level. Nevertheless, size and maturity do matter in such kind of transition. Literature and practice advocate that Small and Medium Enterprises (SME)s face huge barriers to keep high the competitive advantage of their products, thus they first need to act on their processes and internal resources. Among them, lack of competences and limited data exploitation are threatening the competitiveness for the medium-long term the most. Thus, the present contribution aims to present the results obtained from the integrated application of three maturity models focused on skills gap, data management and operations management within the scope of digital maturity. These maturity models were developed as stand-alone tools focusing the attention over a specific need (i.e. operations, people or data). In this contribution, they were integrated to provide an overarching view to develop a unique roadmap towards social and economic sustainable industrial environments. The integrated model was applied to an Italian SME.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the nine enabling technol-ogies of Industry 4.0, which in recent years has seen an exponential increase in its applications. New production devices that are naturally equipped with this technology and the retrofitting solutions for industrial devices already installed in our industries, promote the demand of IIoT solutions. The Inter-net of Thing is often associated with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) due to its ability to provide data which, when appropriately analyzed, feed the PLM system allowing for the tracking of the product along its life cycle.

In this paper, the point of view is reversed: the IIoT solution, which is de-signed, implemented and maintained in an industrial system, is the product that must be managed with a PLM approach.

IIoT solutions have characteristics that require the use of a PLM approach: they must meet complex requirements, they must adhere to standards and be compatible with the company's existing IT infrastructure, they are complex systems that interface many other systems and have a long lifecycle during which they are subject to innumerable modifications and extensions.

It is therefore justified, from a research point of view, to investigate the characteristics that a PLM approach must have to support the development of an IIoT solution.

This paper, based on the theory and evidences from industries and acade-mies, traces a reference framework for the development of an IIoT solution supported by the PLM approach.

To test the validity of the proposed guidelines, the paper illustrates their ap-plication in the development of a simple IoT solution dedicated to teaching and training.

Food & Beverage (F&B) has experienced a remarkable increase in the diver-sification of products, leading to a consequential increase in variability, which, if not properly managed, would result in tampering profitability. Assuming that this trend cannot be reversed, manufacturers must foster their operations' efficiency, thus sustaining their competitiveness. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm is recognized worldwide as one of the preferred paths to address this issue. Since Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Multinational Companies (MNC) face diverse barriers, they both must be supported in this transition. Specifically, MNCs require to exploit existing synergies among different plants and build common infrastructures. This paper, through an industrial case, proposes a methodology aimed at creating a unique technology roadmap (TRM) to enable the desired digital transformation of a whole MNC’s country branch by starting from the MNC’s objectives and the digital maturity assessment of the single plants. The industrial case, the Italian branch of a Swiss MNC (3 plants), allowed to support C-Levels in identifying the priority areas at subsidiary level and in allocating resources accordingly. Regarding the theoretical implications, the re-search allowed to shift from a single-plant view, adopted by several TRM studies, to a cross-plant cross-function integrated approach.

This study aims to review the literature about sustainable practices, urban planning on smart cities, and digital transformation, published from 2015 to 2023, and present insights and directions for future research. In addition, it offers an initial proposal to build a preliminary framework of sustainable practices, digital transformation, smart cities, and urban planning, focusing on the Brazilian reality. Since the attempt is to research the effects and impacts that each of these variables exerts on each other with positive, negative, or mediating effects to verify the sustainable performance of urban planning, what is perceived is a gap in research on the effects and impacts between them. In this context, a theoretical essay was carried out based on the systematic review of current articles on the database Scopus. The study selects 86 papers objectively and conducts metadata analysis, finding preliminarily that the proper functioning and the effects and impacts between the variables are much more complex. Therefore, it requires a version of a systemic approach of parameters and criteria commonly accepted in its dimensions, seeking to broaden and deepen the themes once the analysis made it possible to identify a relative scarcity of scientific research on the subject and its dissemination in Brazil.