The Digital Factory: A Reference Process Based Software Market Analysis

Today, industrial enterprises are increasingly facing the need to achieve shorter lifecycles for their products, which at the same time are getting more and more complex. One approach to face this challenge is to introduce the Digital Factory. The Digital Factory is defined as an IT system capable of digitally planning, controlling and optimizing all resources and activities related to a product which are performed beginning with its development and ending in the order processing – prior to the start of the real production of the product. In this article a newly defined reference process for the Digital Factory is used as basis for a software classification schema. Using this schema the results of a software market analysis for the Digital Factory domain have been structured and interpreted from a process and functionality coverage point of view. With this approach, the authors were able to prove that the amount of software solutions available within this domain is huge. This generates a need for IT support within the software selection process for the Digital Factory domain. To achieve this, a first concept for a structured software selection process is introduced. The results of this article can be used as a basis for future research on this topic.