For European leadership in strategic and high-value-added products, new business models and value-creation structures are needed. In addition to the focus on products, however, the service business is one of the key factors for differentiation from the competition, particularly in the manufacturing industry. Companies from outside the EU are now offering increasingly better product alternatives at often lower prices. Against this background, the development of strategic and high value added products must not end with the product. Product service systems incorporate this factor. This not only achieves consistent optimization of the product by permanently adapting it to customer needs. The largest part of the CO2 footprint in the manufacturing industry occurs in the utilization phase of the machines. Service offers a wide range of opportunities to have a positive impact on environmental sustainability or to offer Re-X (such as remanufacturing or recycling) as services.

Two additional focus areas for this topic should be:
1. Organisational structures will adapt to the new paradigm of a Circular economy and thereby to the changing business models (i.e. multidimensional business models are key for a successful circular economy) and working in circular, connected manufacturing ecosystems.  Companies will need support on those transformation paths.
2. Transition to circular, connected manufacturing ecosystems will be realized in each company/organization. Leaders/ managers need to be supported on how to manage a company on all levels to also develop a circular mindset and open up to inter-organizational cooperation, the basis of ecosystems.

When products need to be (re-)designed for remanufacturing, we need a focus on an everlasting core and standardized models to add on to reach high service levels throughout a prolonged life-cycle

To ensure product information along their extended lifetime to be collected,  these inspection and measurement approaches do not only need to assure high, quality, traceability, and compliance with quality standards but also dynamic ecosystem standards.

Archetypes of development parts are needed such as a maturity index for service transformation. This transformation starts with classic services that help maintain machine performance. (For example, repairs, inspections, intelligent spare parts management, etc.) They thus enable the circular economy in the sense that they extend service life. In terms of the maturity index, they follow the following logic: Reactive (provided at standstill), Preventive (provided interval- or condition-based), Predictive (predictive, then usually using data-based components). The last maturity level then flows into the next level of the maturity index, digital services (e.g., access to training videos, chatbots, predictive analytics, etc.). This requires access to the application data. However, the potential for the circular economy is high, as performances are improved and workloads are increased. The final step is the maturity index is the development of as-a-service offerings. Due to the necessary integration of the provider into the customer processes, they offer the most significant potential for increasing sustainability and for a flexible and productive manufacturing industry. 

An important aspect that has not been addressed yet properly is the integration of the specific organizational processes of companies and their IT systems. Hence we propose to add the topic of "Integration of data spaces into business applications (ERP, MES)  

Focusing only on HMI seems a bit low in ambition, it would be a good idea to include low code/no-code explicitly. 

Organizational structures will adapt to the new paradigm of a circular economy and the connected transformation of factory work. Organizational design and new blueprints are needed so a company can meet this transformation.