Digital transformation in enterprises: Industry 4.0

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saturated of these. Hence the demand is now concentrated on substitute and 
complementary goods or anyways smaller volumes than those to which the 
market was used to, thus the market turned out to be no longer made up for 
mass consumers. Also the energy crisis of 1973 and the consequent economic 
situation that it led, played an important role in the decline of the Ford’s 
enterprise. Before 1973, at the time of mass consumption, the price of oil was 
very low compared to the one of today and stood at almost $ 3 per barrel, by 
1973 the price rose to $11 per barrel. 
In such moment of crisis of the Fordist companies, that had dominated the 
international economic context for decades and had allowed the spread of 
consumer goods and economic development, the companies, in order to be 
more competitive, had to change their business model towards a higher 
rationalization of the production costs and the total elimination of waste. This 
was the philosophy that the engineer Taiichi Ōno, in Japan, enforced to the 
automotive factory Toyota Motor Corporation which in the 1950’s was known 
and limited exclusively to the small and closed Japanese market solely, which 
in the following years reached and exceeded, in terms of efficiency, the 
largest automotive companies, including Ford, becoming thus one of the 
largest automakers today. 
Such new way of producing and setting the tasks that were consolidating and 
spreading among the Japanese companies was the “Toyotism”; it was 
characterized by the fact that each worker, that was extremely specialized 
comparing to a worker under the Fordism, could produce per capita to a 
greater extent than in the past, using the resources available to him more 
productively. The concept was to produce more with less and, therefore more 
competitively.  
Hence the workers appear to be much more specialized: workgroups are 
created and they become responsible for the production process as a whole,