Systemic Assessment of IoT Readiness and Economic Impact in Postal Services

This research develops and applies the IoTRIM model to assess the economic and operational implications of IoT integration in postal and courier enterprises in Slovakia. Combining a multi-criteria evaluation framework with an extended Cobb–Douglas production function, the analysis captures both readiness levels and their translation into output performance. The IoTRIM assessment reveals heterogeneous distributions of strengths across four strategic and technical pillars, with notable disparities between connectivity, data analytics, and interoperability capacities. Monte Carlo simulations under pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic scenarios highlight divergent digital trajectories among enterprises, with some demonstrating accelerated gains from IoT readiness while others face structural bottlenecks in infrastructure and process integration. Hypothesis testing indicates that while a positive and statistically significant relationship between IoT readiness and output is observed in selected cases, this effect is not universal across all enterprises and scenarios. However, the inclusion of IoT readiness consistently improves the explanatory power of the production function models. The findings underline that digital transformation outcomes depend not only on investment scale but also on systemic absorption capacity, including interoperability, data governance, and organizational alignment. The proposed approach offers both a methodological contribution for measuring digital readiness impacts and practical insights for strategic planning in the postal and courier sector.