SAP Aligns New Solutions With "Industry 4.0" Innovation

SAP AG has announced new releases of manufacturing solutions and updates for existing solutions covering engineering, manufacturing and sustainable operations.

The manufacturing industry today is facing a technological milestone. Machines, production facilities and warehousing systems are able to autonomously exchange information, trigger actions and control each other, promising huge improvements in the industrial processes involved in manufacturing, engineering and service. This fourth industrial revolution, called Industry 4.0, offers the promise of bringing two worlds together — industrial manufacturing and next-generation IT — to create a new level of efficiency and effectiveness.

SAP is adapting Industry 4.0 principles through the development of “Idea to Performance,” a holistic business approach to increase product and service performance. The approach enables full management of a product’s entire life cycle from design to service within distinct scenarios. For example, “Responsive Manufacturing” delivers end-to-end processes integrating the plan-to-produce process. Embedded quality and compliance controls enable manufacturers to address non-conformance through corrective and preventive actions while simultaneously setting more predictable and shorter cycle times, helping to both improve asset utilisation and support on-time delivery.

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“Idea to Performance” incorporates enablement of new and existing solutions by SAP Business Suite software powered by the SAP HANA platform, first introduced in January 2013. “Responsive Manufacturing” is planned to be underpinned by offerings powered by SAP HANA, including the SAP Overall Equipment Effectiveness Management (SAP OEE Management) application, which is planned to collect machine data via machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and transform it into analytical insights; the material requirement planning capability within the SAP ERP application, which aims to deliver high-speed reads for a 50 percent reduction in run time; and the SAP Product Portfolio Management application, which is intended to help improve the run time of critical project management transactions.

“At Elster, we see Industry 4.0 as an opportunity to engage with products that steer themselves intelligently through the production process and save all relevant data,” said Roland Essmann, Project Lead MES, Elster GmbH. “SAP is one of the few IT companies who can cover all relevant processes end-to-end from R&D, engineering, construction, to sales in one standard system. With SAP Manufacturing Execution and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence, data are well prepared to be transferred to a product and vice versa, and the solutions are web based, which is important to realise Industry 4.0 as well.”

“In today’s competitive business environment, there is renewed focus on manufacturing as a space for innovation and revolution; IT provides significant potential for business process innovation in manufacturing,” said Kerstin Geiger, Senior Vice President, Solution Management, Discrete and Process Industries, SAP. “By investing in predictive analytics and new technologies to help users in maintenance and after-market service, we are better able to serve the manufacturing industry as it continues to grow and evolve.”