Industry 4.0: Audit for Verifying Compliance with Requirements

On the strength of an ever-expanding business, it has increased productivity by 75 percent in recent years, while also growing in the supply of first assemblies for many major brands.

Several prestigious sporting successes have also propelled the Company to the world’s highest level of attention.

Foreword

The Company entrusts PRAXI with the task of verifying the maintenance of the Industry 4.0 requirements, as a beneficiary of the benefits, in compliance with what is specified by the Inland Revenue Circular 9/E dated 23/07/2021: “it shall be the responsibility of the Company to document, through adequate and systematic reporting, throughout the period of enjoyment of the benefits, compliance with the 5+2/3 technological characteristics and the interconnection requirement.”

Specifically, an Audit is requested from PRAXI certifying the outcome of the surveys.

Project

The Audit covered 22 assets belonging to different categories, both tangible (machinery, production equipment, quality control instrumentation) and intangible.

The project, which involved a multidisciplinary team of PRAXI Senior Consultants experienced in asset valuation and strategic analysis in the IT field, was as follows:

• 2 physical inspections at the Company, assisted by administrative and technical contact persons, to prepare, in agreement with the client, the procedural process to be followed and replicated;
• Physical verification of assets;
• Analysis of accounting/administrative data, to identify any investments on the assets under consideration from the date of their initial installation;
• On-site spot checks for compliance with requirements on the 5+2/3 technology and interconnection features. This last aspect involved querying the enterprise systems to verify whether the asset had provided, with some temporal regularity, feedback within the network and whether that feedback had been properly saved/archived as evidence of continuous interconnection over time;
• Development of a simplified report template that can express in a streamlined manner what is required by the regulations, for subsequent notarization.

Results

The work carried out made it possible to provide a response to the Client on a new topic of recent legislation, producing a result on a certified and replicable basis, which can also be used in the event of subsequent audits by third-party agencies.

In addition to certifying in a sworn form the maintenance of Industry 4.0 requirements, the 360-degree advisory input provided to the Company enabled the transfer of useful best practices to improve access, retrieval and storage of data for future use.