**4. Inspiration for SMEs on starting their digital transformation: recommendations**

Our research focused on the SMEs' need for support to cope with the challenge of remaining competitive in increasingly changing markets. Through the model validation in the real cases, we verified that adopting managerial capabilities of industrial processes supported by digitalization not only provides a competitive advantage to SMEs but also can assist in enhancing the production system performance. The digitalization topic is in a novel field, therefore creating a model that applies to a broad range of manufacturing environments is hard to achieve. Nevertheless, an outcome of the lessons learned from the study cases in this research is the analytical generalization:

