Furniture X is growing. Networking as the Key to the Digital Transformation of the Furniture Industry
On June 3, 2026, the initiative's founders and a broader group of experts attended a meeting of the Furniture X initiative at the Institute of German Economy in Cologne. The meeting's central focus was building targeted connections with related initiatives and networks to ensure interoperability across the entire supply chain.
An important step in this direction is connecting with other X initiatives. For instance, TÜV Süd, through its participation in Chem-X and Factory-X, serves as a link to the process industry. Additionally, the “Wald 4.0” initiative, represented by RWTH Aachen University, joined as a partner. The Adhesives Association has also been identified as a relevant network with which to collaborate more closely in the future, as has already been successfully done with the wood-based materials and hardware industries.
One of the main topics of the meeting was "DPP 4.0," introduced by Prof. Dieter Wegener (Siemens). It became clear that, in order to derive Digital Product Passports (DPPs) from digital twins of furniture with semantic ECLASS IDs, one crucial prerequisite must be met: the ability to convert suppliers’ proprietary information structures and terminologies into the standardized product description language, ECLASS. In the future, an "ECLASS Quality Service" will facilitate this conversion, forming a central foundation for information gathering along the furniture supply chain.
Furniture X is thus firmly committed to using ECLASS as a common semantic basis and emphasizes that the DPP can only realize its full potential when industry standards, networks, and data quality converge.
