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In the age of digitalization, manufacturing companies are under increased pressure to change due to product complexity, growing customer requirements and digital business models. The increasing digitization of processes and products is opening up numerous opportunities for mechanical engineering companies to exploit the resulting potential for value creation. Subscription business is a new form of business model in the mechanical engineering industry, which aims to continuously increase customer benefit to align the interests of both companies and customers. Characterized by a permanent data exchange, databased learning about customer behavior, and the transfer into continuous innovations to increase customer value, subscription business helps to make Industry 4.0 profitable. The fact that machines and plants are connected to the internet and exchange large amounts of data results in critical information security risks. In addition, the loss of knowledge and control, data misuse and espionage, as well as the manipulation of transaction or production data in the context of subscription transactions are particularly high risks. Complementary to direct and obvious consequences such as loss of production, the attacks are increasingly shifting to non-transparent and creeping impairments of production or product quality, which are only apparent at a late stage, or the influencing of payment flows. A transparent presentation of possible risks and their scope, as well as their interrelationships, does not exist. This paper shows a research approach in which the structure of subscription models and their different manifestations based on their risks and vulnerabilities are characterized. This allows suitable cyber security measures to be taken at an early stage. From this basis, companies can secure existing or planned subscription business models and thus strengthen the trust of business partners and customers.
The digital transformation brings up various new tasks to manage new business application software and integrate them into existing business processes and legacy systems, which are necessary to keep e.g. a production system running. Today, all these tasks are on the one hand not clearly defined and on the other hand, responsibility of these cross-disciplinary tasks is unclear in companies being mostly structured in a function-oriented way. While quality management has developed to a firmly established function of process excellence years ago, IT-application management is still to become an inevitable part of the digital transformation. There are just a few authors trying to define and describe this part, the related tasks, and necessary roles in an organization. In this paper, we show how the business needs of a company can influence the ideal adaptation of the digitization solutions and thus become the success of the digital transformation. We base the paper on a use case in manufacturing companies. We then describe how companies deal with business application systems today. Based on the framework Aachen Digital Architecture Management we describe how a company can holistically improve the management of business application systems.