## 4 Discussion  
It is worth mentioning that all participating companies have familiarized themselves with the ADVanced MAnufacturing digital maturity survey methodology [87]. The ADMA covers seven areas of transformation, including those shown in Figure 10, to provide a comprehensive analysis. ADMA offers insights into a manufacturing company's processes and opportunities for digitalization, streamlining, and optimization. The diagram in Figure 11 shows the main issues in the transformation areas of the ADMA methodology. Figure 11: Key issues in the ADMA methodology transformation areas. Figure 10: Transformation areas defined within the Advanced Manufacturing methodology. The methodology emphasizes digitalizing manufacturing companies by implementing specialized IT solutions. When small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) perform an ADMA scan, they often try to focus on all aspects of the transformation process. However, they tend to overlook the workload and costs associated with upgrading their employees' competencies, integrating hardware and software, ensuring adequate cyber-security, dealing with technology dependencies, managing changes in employee roles, maintaining new machinery and equipment, and complying with environmental regulations, managing sensitive data, and protecting the company's intellectual property. The author's method outlines key areas of development for companies to ensure business continuity and gain a competitive advantage while adhering to the ADMA methodology. The method proposed in the article provides a targeted approach to specific areas of factories that complement ADMA. In the next stage, the study analyzed the impact of automation on the development of other areas. The main goal was to pinpoint the key areas related to the automation of production processes. Entrepreneurs have identified areas where automation maturity is forecast to increase and should be included in development plans. Figure 12 shows the analysis results of the key enterprise areas being developed due to the growing advancement of automation of production processes (KA1). Ninety-four percent of entrepreneurs decided to develop production process automation (KA1) further. The second area identified is increasing the share of robot integration in automated production processes (78%; KA2), and the third is implementing automated solutions to improve the maturity of digitization of warehouse processes (76%; KA3). The area of business management systems integration (KA6) showed the lowest correlation rate and 75% of those surveyed stated a lack of interest in the complex integration of factory management systems in favor of investment in production automation. Most respondents, around 70%, delayed the pursuit of flexibility (KA4) in their production systems to a later period. Only 32% of the respondents prioritized intralogistics (KA5) due to the abandonment of the development of manufacturing flexibility with mobile robots. Figure 13 shows the interest levels in each ADMA transformation, indicating a long-term (5-year) perspective. Figure 12: Level of interest in individual key areas of manufacturing companies, where KA1 is the automation of production processes, KA2 is the robotization of production processes, KA3 is the Digitization of warehouse processes, KA4 is the flexibility of production systems, KA5 is the intralogistics of production processes (inter-station and inter-department transport), and KA6 is the integration of management, production, quality control, intralogistics, and warehousing systems. Entrepreneurs have initiated activities to streamline the current flow of materials and finished products. The presented plans show that small and medium-sized enterprises concentrate on specific areas of development, neglecting essential aspects of the impact that newly introduced solutions may have on other areas of activity.