  The digital transformation of companies is expected to increase the digital
interconnection between different companies to develop optimized, customized,
hybrid business models. These cross-company business models require secure,
reliable, and traceable logging and monitoring of contractually agreed
information sharing between machine tools, operators, and service providers.
This paper discusses how the major requirements for building hybrid business
models can be tackled by the blockchain for building a chain of trust and smart
contracts for digitized contracts. A machine maintenance use case is used to
discuss the readiness of smart contracts for the automation of workflows
defined in contracts. Furthermore, it is shown that the number of failures is
significantly improved by using these contracts and a blockchain.
