Design of evaluation items of the security levels for suppliers in the manufacturing industry

Abstract

Owing to the fourth industrial revolution, collaborations between companies and various technologies have become indispensable, particularly in the manufacturing industry. However, technology leakage is likely to occur among cooperative partners where the ratio of small- and medium-sized enterprises is relatively high because of low-security resources. To address this security management problem, we analyzed existing literature and designed a reference model and questions to evaluate security levels reflecting partners’ characteristics to be managed by the manufacturing parent company. We conducted an expert survey to verify the designed model and calculated the weight of each evaluation area. Consequently, we designed a reference model to effectively evaluate, from the perspective of the parent company, partners in manufacturing. We anticipate that the results of this study will assist a parent company in securely sharing data and technologies with partners and being used as a self-diagnosis tool by partners to evaluate its security levels. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.