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2011
Conference Paper
Title
Digital factory economics
Abstract
Most factories already have a more or less adequate grasp on what a Digital Factory is, but hardly realise the possible benefits that an implementation may achieve. Still, especially for SMEs, the evaluation of situation based implementation scenarios of digital tools in the context of a Digital Factory is an insurmountable challenge and often keeps potential users from a further investigation. The main challenge is the lack of accepted and appropriate methods and tools to evaluate the economic efficiency, effectiveness and therefore the expected benefits of the employment of integrated digital tools. This evaluation needs to address a selection of digital tools and needs to be scalable to be able to evaluate different alternative implementation scenarios. This paper presents the foundations and the first steps aiming at the development of a scalable methodology for the evaluation and therefore the selection of suitable digital tools.