SAP Solutions Industry 4.0
SAP has the broad solution portfolio to unlock the value of Industry 4.0, combining the power of intelligent manufacturing in factories and plants with end-to-end business process execution across the supply chain.
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The Industry 4.0 strategy combines SAP solutions for design, manufacture, delivery, and operation in one holistic offering supporting the Industry 4.0 strategic initiatives and best practices. SAP offers a range of leading business solutions, for example, the SAP Enterprise Product Development and SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud solutions and the SAP Asset Strategy and Performance Management and SAP Environmental Health and Safety applications to drive implementation of Industry 4.0 capabilities. Technically, the solution portfolio consists of SAP S/4HANA as the business backbone, integrated with SAP Business Technology Platform, with cloud business applications that extend the core with innovative Industry 4.0 scenarios and connectivity to devices in the factory.
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In addition, SAP IoT provides the data backbone with comprehensive capabilities for smart sensing, big data management, analytics and intelligence, and intelligent edge technology. This enables device connectivity, data lake management, edge processing, a powerful rules engine, and business contextualization of IoT data. The solution enables you to orchestrate business processes in a central cloud environment combined with edge processing to help overcome challenges such as latency and intermittent connectivity to the manufacturing or plant site. You have flexibility and choice between SAP and various hyperscalers for storing and managing data lakes.
The unique mix of SAP business applications, technology platform and edge/IoT services enables you move digitalization from factory- focused initiatives to a company-wide, competitive business strategy that combines manufacturing automation with enterprise business information and execution.
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SAP Solutions Industry 4.0
THE FUTURE SOLUTIONS
Going forward, the SAP solution portfolio will evolve to a comprehensive, integrated digital operations management suite of modular solutions. SAP’s strategy is to provide all capabilities required to run end-to-end factory and plant operations at enterprise scale based on data driven processes. State-of-the-art discrete and process manufacturing operations may be supported, such as modular production, hyper automation and application validation, for example, for life sciences companies. The capabilities will cover the entire manufacturing operations value chain from requirements management, to manufacturing engineering and production planning / dispatching, to logistics and shop floor execution, to insights and intelligence, quality management and asset operations. An imperative for this suite of solutions is to enable data driven end-to-end business processes based on the industrial IoT. Big data management, edge computing and ML capabilities will truly enable process automation and intelligence.
These capabilities can be deployed in a modular fashion, tightly integrated to the entire suite and ERP processes. Here are example capabilities of the digital operations management suite:
Preparing for the manufacturing execution
Preparing for the manufacturing execution, the ‘mission’, production engineering converts engineering to manufacturing bill-of-materials and assigns recipes to plants and labels respectively. Any engineering and recipes changes are governed and the impact to downstream processes are managed. Even complex configure-to-order and engineer-to-order processes are facilitated seamlessly.
Production planning and scheduling
Production planning and scheduling not only optimizes labor, tools, and equipment but also is deeply integrated to cross-plant network planning. Disruptions to the shop floor are managed with what-if analysis and ad-hoc decision support. An AI-based recommendation engine proposes resolutions to these disruptions to optimize shop floor operations based on service levels, such as a desired overall equipment effectiveness, customer lead times or quality levels.
Mission control covers production execution
Mission control covers production execution and process control on the shop floor and worker guidance. Intralogistics ensure material delivery to the line as required, highly automated with the help of autonomous guided vehicles. Modular manufacturing setup is supported with a dynamic routing engine and deeply integrated intra-logistics for work-in-progress and material staging. Shop floor efficiency is increased by intelligent shift reports highlighting non-conformances and safety incidents to drive sustainable process improvements.
Mission assurance
Mission assurance provides insights into global plant and production performance. So, Intelligence such as visual inspections is infused to quality, intralogistics and production operations. Advanced quality management looks at failure mode and effects analysis and resolves issues and complaints in a guided methodology. ML algorithms propose potential root causes to a quality engineer based on previously identified causes for similar cases.
Asset performance management
Particularly, asset performance management maximizes the overall effectiveness of machines. Reliability centered strategies drive maintenance recommendations based on clear failure mode and effects analysis.
Smart sensing
Generally, Smart sensing enables business processes in logistics such as Kanban, goods issue /receipt and plant maintenance.
The Industrial Internet of Things Foundation not only provides a common data model, big data management, a decision engine framework but also edge computing capabilities to run even the most mission critical processes with highest availability. Machines, sensors, and devices can be seamlessly connected, embracing standards such as the asset administration shell and OPC-UA.
To complement SAP’s Industry 4.0 business process capabilities, SAP provides an architecture to support interoperability, integration, and extension. Where needed, standard solutions can be augmented with customer-specific capabilities as well as partner applications. This helps to strike the balance between process standardization and visibility on an enterprise level.
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