Abstract. SMEs are increasingly forced to shift to more sustainable manufacturing. Industry 4.0 can support the transformation and foster innovation. But, SMEs need solutions with a low barrier to entry in terms of investment costs, IT knowledge and capacities. A framework based on open source, low investment and user-oriented IT skills is proposed. As an example, it is implemented in a process chain of the furniture industry and shows a digital twin in terms of monitoring the energy and material flows. In addition, a product-specific allocation of energy consumption, energy peak shaving and other applications are possible.

Keywords: Industry 4.0 technology, green transformation of manufacturing.

Abstract. Digitalization is considered as a driver of resource efficiency. But next to the possible savings that the different digitalization technologies enable, there is an ecological effort, too. Most of the existing approaches in this topic only consider the possible savings. The presented methodology forms an approach for a holistic environmental assessment along the whole life cycle of digitalization technology and validates it on a demonstrator. The aim is to take an end-to-end view of the use of digitalization technologies. As part of the approach, the global warming potential is evaluated. The benefit here is a production environment in which the digitalization technology used generates savings. For the evaluation, the digitalization system (hardware) is considered from the manufacturing process of the different components through transport and operation to recycling (cradle to grave). As practical case study, effort and benefit are finally analyzed for different resource efficiency scenarios. As a result, a methodical approach based on key figures for the holistic evaluation of digitalization technologies is presented and discussed.

Keywords: digitalization of production systems, holistic ecological evaluation, woodworking