The keywords “digitalisation” and “Industry 4.0” are ubiquitous. In detail, however, one can understand very different challenges. Focusing on materials and related manufacturing or machining processes, it means that in the future, one would like to increasingly predict changes in the process, in the material or in the product. If this is achieved, the development times and optimisation processes would be significantly shortened. Engineers would thus have a completely different access to process development and product development. Within the framework of the interdisciplinary junior research group SmartKMU, the central question is therefore how to use smart simulation tools to make digitisation usable along the product creation process, especially for SMEs in limited digital infrastructures. To do this, the necessary complexity of the material and process models must be simplified to the extent that they can reliably predict reality as digital twins, but can be calculated on the engineer’s “workstation PC”. In addition to the indispensable human resources, this also creates the technical prerequisite for easy integration into companies’ working methods and thus contributes significantly to the necessary digitalisation and thus increase the competitiveness of SMEs.