## 4 Results
### Integration of Boundary Conditions, KPIs and Temporal Dependency  
The consideration of boundary conditions is enormously important for decision support, since these have a significant influence on the expression of economic effects [10; 11; 15]. Company-specific aspects (e.g., industry, strategy, market position, value chain), product-specific aspects (e.g., product life cycle, quantity, complexity) or project-specific aspects (e.g., project volume, project duration, qualification of employees) can have a major impact on the achievable targets. This information must be stored for the effects in the Sys-IMF in order to be able to derive particular patterns for the different boundary conditions in the long term. In order to consistently represent this feature in the model, the different boundary conditions are linked to the effects and modeled by means of a dependency matrix. This matrix is used to clearly display cross-diagram relationships and dependencies between a wide variety of model elements. The model range to be displayed in rows and columns can be adjusted manually and, in addition to visualizing relationships between model elements, new relationships can also be generated. Consequently, the matrix allows complex interrelationships to be clearly presented and thus better analyzed [52]. Figure 5 shows an example of such a dependency matrix for the procurement phase and selected boundary conditions. The matrix shows the strength or weakness of an effect in the context of a particular boundary condition. This also represents the first step towards linking mathematical formulas, which has already been implemented to some extent in [15]. The rows contain examples of company-specific boundary conditions, which can be adapted or extended as required. The columns include the target variables with IDs that essentially represent the respective impact chain. The correlation indicates the direction of the characteristic--for example, in the case of process costs (ID 2010), significant savings can only be achieved from a quantity of around 100 units. Such relationships are easily represented to the Dependency Matrix and can be modeled consistently. By using relation maps, the relationships from the matrix can be visualized and important statements regarding the occurrence of the respective effects under certain boundary conditions can be obtained [53]. Figure 6 shows an example of a partial relation map for the number of pieces (1-10 pcs). Figure 5: Dependency matrix representation of boundary conditions for economic effects. In the figure, the connections for the reinforced expression are shown, but other dependencies or boundary conditions can also be displayed. The relation map thus allows a targeted analysis of the economic impacts in relation to the stored boundary conditions for the respective life cycle phase and can be edited directly in the representation. The KPIs are integrated at the level of economic effects (see Figure 3) in order to enable direct allocation to the key target values for the subsequent concept evaluation. For this purpose, suitable KPIs with associated calculation bases are assigned for each impact chain (Table 2). These arise partly from the literature as well as from the analysis of the individual impact chains per se. Since the model includes different target variables such as costs, time, quality and flexibility, different parameters in the form of KPIs are required. For the cost-related effects, the indirect cost savings through the savings of process costs are often determined. Here the calculation principles are frequently based on the methodical procedure of the Time-driven Activity-based Costing method (TD-ABC) [54], with which the costs are calculated by the necessary process times and the number of repetitions as well as the respective cost rate of the process step, e.g., the order costs (ID 2060) in the procurement phase. However, direct cost calculation methods are also stored in the model, such as the calculation of direct material costs (ID 1000 and 1040) according to [55].