The circular economy (CE) is an economic philosophy aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources. It emphasises designing products for longevity, reuse, and recycling to create a closed-loop system. One of the goals of enterprise modelling (EM) is to support enterprises in change processes from the current situation into a desired future state. In the context of the transition to the CE, the question arises if and how EM methods and languages must be adapted for the CE. The main contributions of this work are a better understanding of the challenges manufacturing enterprises face when preparing their product architectures for the circular economy, a meta-model preparing the product perspective in EM methods for CE, and an investigation of what changes are required in EM methods. The aim is also to identify necessary methodical and technological adaptations of EM for supporting the transition of enterprises to CE.

 In the interdisciplinary work of computer scientists and mechanical engineers on integrating IT components into physical products and creating prod-ucts-services-systems, we observed that design and development processes cross-cutting the traditional boundaries of disciplines reveal unexpected differences in seemingly easy-to-define and understood terminology. More concretely, at first glance, the terms module and interface have the same meaning in both disci-plines. Still, substantial differences became apparent when implementing design and development processes for products that extend a traditional physical product by IT-controlled functionality and customer services. Motivated by an example of quantified product design, this paper analyses commonalities and differences between the meaning of module and interface in the involved disciplines. We propose an integrative definition with the term "interface" in its focus.

The main objective of this article is to structure and clarify the transdisciplinary reality of modularization as a foundation for handling business-driven modularization of smart products. Lately, the complexity has increased in the industry due to global manufacturing, different customer requirements, legal requirements, digitalization, new business models, and the evolvement of smart products. The increasingly complex reality has been acknowledged on an enterprise engineering level where complexity is one part of different grand challenges for enterprises. This complexity needs to be handled both horizontally (in the whole value chain) and vertically (on all management levels). It is therefore essential to clarify the modularization landscape by bringing together the business domain, and the engineering domain to cater for the future of modularization. The main contribution of this paper is to suggest a conceptualization of the modularization domain through a meta-model that covers essential aspects of business-driven modularization of smart products.

The specification of interfaces is critical in modularization and product architecture development. Literature defines product architecture as (1) the arrangement of functional elements, (2) the mapping from functional elements to physical components (3) the specification of the interfaces between interacting physical components. However, other scholars state that interfaces should include more than physical components, such as spatial, material, energy, and information exchange. This view has been extended to include attachment, transfer, control and communication, power, spatial, field, and environmental interfaces. However, to use interfaces through the product lifecycle and reuse them between product architectures and generations, there must be an approach to handle applicable interfaces in a company. This research contributes by presenting a way to operationalize (investigate an abstract concept, it's essential to make it measurable and tangible) interfaces by introducing interface requirements that are definable, measurable, definable, and testable properties as a part of the interface development process and interface description. The method is illustrated by applying it in an industrial case study.

Small and medium-sized (SME) manufacturing enterprises have been described as a sector that traditionally has not been data-intensive, with low spending on IT and cybersecurity and employees with low cybersecurity awareness. SMEs have also been described as agile and under pressure to adopt new technology and embrace digitalization to gain a competitive advantage. Entering this data intensive world also comes with new risks, making them extra vulnerable. Not much attention has been directed at how SMEs in the manufacturing sector are working with improving employees’ cybersecurity awareness. Especially not where cybersecurity training programs are in focus. To investigate these aspects, we opted for a set of five SMEs in the manufacturing industry where it was possible to perform in-depth semi-structured interviews with chief information security officers’ (CISO) and employees. The results show several interesting results, for example, regarding the view on contextualization of training material and the relevance of microlearning. The study also presents several practical implications, including recommendations for improving cybersecurity training measures for SMEs in the manufacturing sector.