Students are enabled to digitize products, services and business models in the sense of Industry 4.0 and 5.0, to evaluate and select the necessary technologies and to prepare the stakeholders as customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders for the changes.

The connecting elements are decision-making and management theories, as the focus is on making effective long-term decisions. The engineering and business data and information required for decision-making are collected, compiled, processed in a structured manner, transferred to decision-making models and finally analyzed in preparation for decision-making. The various decision-making fields, decision-making situations, decision-makers, decision-making models, types of decision-making methods and decision-making methods are taught as a basis for decision-making and classified with regards to the use cases.

Decision-making is practiced based typical decision cases and the consequences of decisions are analyzed and evaluated. Students learn about the ideas and approaches behind the key terms Artificial Intelligence, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0, the Internet of Things. Typical decision situations compare in particular the investment and operating costs of analog and digital business models as well as manual, partially automated and fully automated production systems. The use of alternative, partly modular automation technologies, in particular based on the newly developed Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 technologies in production systems, is evaluated. Students learn to assess the benefits of automation and derive optimization approaches for conventional product manufacturing processes, taking costs into account.

The analysis of how these decisions at the interface of business administration, computer science and mechanical engineering influence the (digital) business models of companies on the one hand and the stakeholders as customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders on the other, and how this influence can be positively shaped, is the subject of the final consideration based on current management theories and approaches.