Motivation

Companies – especially in the field of machine tool manufacturing – are increasingly caught between the conflicting priorities of profitability and sustainability. The reasons for this include stricter legal regulations and increasing customer requirements. In addition, technological progress, global challenges and constantly growing competition result in companies fundamentally rethinking the way they create value. Circular business models that integrate economic and ecological criteria are considered a promising approach. There is still a lack of tools to capture the complexity of a circular economy within a value stream and to derive appropriate measures to increase circularity.

Objectives

The objective of BePro-CEND is to facilitate companies in the machine tool industry to develop their own digital service offerings in order to enable an end-to-end circular economy. To do this, it is necessary to determine the status quo of the companies in order to implement economically and ecologically optimised business models and business ecosystems accordingly.

Approaches

In BePro-CEND, methods for designing and optimising digital, circular business models and business cases are developed. These include a morphology for mapping and deriving business model alternatives as well as a maturity model for digital, circular service offerings. The combination of morphology and maturity model enables a systematic analysis of the state of a company network and the derivation of measures to improve circularity. In addition, analytical procedures for effort assessment, revenue modelling and quantification of user and ecological benefits are developed in order to combine sustainability and economic efficiency.

The concepts will be further developed and evaluated in practical use cases with the project partners. These include the development of digital service offerings for monitoring and recycling coolants as well as for intensifying and extending the utilisation phase of machine tools and their components.

The implementation concept focuses on a web application in which the morphology and maturity model are provided interactively, providing SMEs in the mechanical engineering sector with low-threshold support in the planning and introduction of digital, circular service offerings.

The web application is supplemented by workshops and a guideline. In the EUREKA project BePro-CEND, partners from Germany and Switzerland are working together and benefiting from transnational cooperation. Complementary research competences and increased international activities in the field of digital services can further accelerate their dissemination.

Acknowledgement

This project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Projektträger Karlsruhe (PTKA). We would like to thank for the opportunity to work on this project.

Funding source

Project sponsor