Assessment of the Situation of the Digital Development of the Hungarian Food Industry

Debrenti, Attila Sándor – Herdon, Miklós

Keywords: food industry, Industry 4.0, digitization, ICT development, Q01, L66, M15, O33

Thanks to the rapid development of information technologies, industrial processes’ digitization and automation also pose new challenges for food business operators. As digitalisation technologies are one of the tools for enterprises’ operation in increasing their efficiency, we considered it important to examine the digitalisation readiness of the Hungarian food industry. Our research examined the company toolkit, the role and relationship of integrated Enterprise Information Systems (ERP) in decision support, the use of Business Analysis tools (BI), and company opinions on technologies supporting Industry 4.0 based on indicators and complex indicators. 52% of the food businesses in the analysis sample have an internal local computer network, and 73% have a website. The proportion of companies using cloud-based services and operating an integrated enterprise information system is 29-31%. The rate of users of business intelligence devices is only 10%. The ratios vary significantly by company size. All of those in the large enterprise category use an ERP system. However, the proportion of business intelligence (business analytics) applications can be said to be low (36%) even in this size category. According to the sub-sector (food industry sector) and company sizes, we obtained 4 groups of enterprises based on the cluster analysis. According to the number of surveyed enterprises, the proportion of those classified in each cluster is as follows: “Lagging (23%)”, “Aspiring (33%)”, “Developing (41%)”, “Leaders (3%)”. Most companies belong to the “Developers” group, and only a few medium and large companies belong to the “Leaders” group. We find a third of large companies here.

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