Introduction

Currently, customers increasingly strive for maximization of personalized value. This becomes particularly obvious in the demand for individualized products and the increasing influence of customers on the development and the production processes [1]. Factories can only meet this challenge by the application of digital technologies. In Germany, the term Industrie 4.0 represents the aspired target state. Through improvements in information, communication and automation technology live information is available over life cycles of products, processes and factories. Production systems, products and humans are closely networked. Moreover, the resulting big data is used for holistic optimization. [2, 3, 4] This special situation gives rise to opportunities and risks for mechanical engineering enterprises. Based on customer data there are numerous new possibilities for product and process improvements including the optimization of the machining process or spare part forecasting services. At the same time, they are confronted with new demands. Customers not just want to buy a physical machine but service systems, consisting of hard- and software, that offer additional value in their unique context [1, 4, 5]. Examples are context-based features and information for machine operators that support manufacturing to adapt rapidly changing customer needs. To realize such use cases a close collaboration of manufacturers and mechanical engineering enterprise is required. Through this development, IT is not any longer just a technological tool to improve the efficiency of internal processes. By becoming an essential part of the value creation it grows up to a new source of competitive advantage and thus takes a transformative role [5]. The required extension of products by digital components to the point of cyber-physical systems and their integration into service systems leads enterprises in mechanical engineering into a fundamental change process – the digital transformation. Besides mechanics and electronics they now need to develop digital capabilities and implement them into fast-changing, cross-company processes and structures. Especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) this is an enormous challenge [6]. With the help of business model appraoches, many enterprises already started to design digital value creation concepts. But these means are very limited when it comes to deriving and implementing processes and IT services. In contrast to existing IT-based products, the new service logic requires a holistic process view. To take full advantage of the digital opportunities adequate models, methods and tools are needed [4, 7]. With enterprise architectures (EA) information systems literature already offers a well-proven solution for this challenge [8, 9]. The aim of this paper is to examine if this approach is appropriate for digital transformation in SMEs of mechanical engineering. Therefore, digital transformation and EA are defined. Afterwards, strengths and weaknesses of EA in the context of digital transformation in SMEs are analyzed. In addition, this paper presents the first steps for the development of a method for the holistic planning of the digital transformation in small and mediumsized mechanical engineering enterprises.