Knowledge management to compete in digital era: skills evolution of enterprise systems

National Industry 4.0 Plan is contributing to introduce new digital industrial technologies within the enterprise sector. This has brought the researchers and the experts of the sector to study as the business equilibriums are evolving and what new emergent professionalisms can be. On this basis, the paper aims to identify these skills and analyze professional’s dynamics, in order to achieve a higher level of competitiveness on the national manufacturing sector 4.0 stage. National Industry 4.0 Plan provides significant incentives aimed at strengthening R&D investments and incentivizing new technologies investments, as well as developing new skills among the professionals who will play a primary role in the "new 4.0 companies". Therefore, Industry 4.0 does not only intend to promote investments in new machinery and technologies, but, in parallel, to modify both, the productive and organizational paradigms, to effectively manage the indispensable and delicate process of cultural and organizational transformation. In other words, the goal is to transform all the processes into a continuous sequence of interconnected inter-digitally phases, which will be managed by an inter-functional group that has complete responsibility for it. This target is to be considered as a result of a training process across all company levels, which, according to a bottom up approach, stimulates a process of new skills creation and increases the sense of belonging to the company. This process also accompanying the profound changes of non-technological nature, which, however, are a presupposition and consequence of technology. In this perspective, the paper intends to set up a desk analysis - where the main focus are the national SMEs - aimed at better identifying the necessary skills to achieve a higher competitiveness level in the landscape 4.0 and, consequently, analysing the evolution of the professionalism that are characterizing the evolution of the enterprise systems.