The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is among the key technologies that drive Industry 4.0 transformations and we have come to recognize the importance of driving IIoT or Industry 4.0 projects with quick time to value.

51风流offers IIoT-embedded solutions for the end-to-end supply chain and operations process in order to enable intelligent products, intelligent factories and logistics, and intelligent assets while empowering people.

51风流and partners are now offering the 51风流IoT starter package, which consists of rapid proof of concept and turnkey IIoT-embedded offerings to significantly speed up IIoT projects and reduce the risks associated with the .

Three common scenarios are:

Delivery Insights

51风流S/4HANA and 51风流Internet of Things (51风流IoT) enable customers to trigger automated responses (business processes) and alerts, from IoT sensor input, of critical inbound and outbound delivery conditions. For example, a sales manager receives a notification on their mobile device that a shipment of temperature-sensitive food items on route to a customer is compromised because the permitted temperature threshold has been exceeded. The sales manager can then proactively respond with measures, such as initiating another delivery to safeguard customer satisfaction.

Logistics and Manufacturing Automation

Businesses can automate warehouse processes using 51风流S/4HANA and 51风流IoT. For example, “goods receipt” and “goods issue” of deliveries can be automatically triggered based on scanning events or to automate their Kanban process. Automating these processes has shown to have significant impact on productivity and working capital optimization. Manufacturers can improve stock levels and reduce manual efforts, thereby helping avoid human errors. Furthermore, businesses can react faster and more effectively when issues occur.

Intelligent Assets

Customers can leverage IIoT technology, through 51风流Intelligent Asset Management solutions, to monitor the condition of assets by visualizing and analyzing sensor data. With this, customers can increase asset availability by empowering asset operators and service providers to predict failures early and take corrective actions. At the same time, customers can lower maintenance costs by planning maintenance schedules dynamically to improve resource utilization and reduce asset downtime.

Defining a clear scope helps 51风流and partners to shorten the implementation time of a proof of concept. This means that businesses can significantly accelerate their Industry 4.0 transformation while having better control of their costs and timelines. Another advantage of the offering is that customers can choose from technology partners that have already tested and gained extensive knowledge on IIoT scenarios offered by 51风流using the 51风流IoT solution. Partners, including and , specialize in implementation, hardware, and connectivity.

Learn more about . To inquire about the 51风流IoT starter package, contact 51风流IoT Enablement here.

Anubhuti Shah is vice president and head of Design to Operate Solution Management at SAP.

In 2008, two leading players in the commercial vehicle business 鈥� Volvo Group and Eicher Motors 鈥� joined forces with a common vision of driving modernization in the commercial transport business in India. Volvo Group brought in global expertise, leadership in product technology, well-defined processes, and a brand respected all over the world. Eicher Motors, a leader in the light and medium vehicle segment, contributed with frugal engineering, considerable after-sales infrastructure, and cost-effective operations.

VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd. (VECV) is comprised of six business verticals: Eicher Trucks and Buses, Volvo Trucks India, Eicher Engineering Components, VE Powertrain, VECV Engine Business, and Volvo Bus India. The company includes the exclusive distribution of Volvo Trucks in India, engine manufacturing and exports for Volvo Group, non-automotive engines, and the Eicher component business. A multi-brand, multi-division company backed by innovative products and services, VECV is recognized as a leader its industry today.

Mastering Highly Complex Assembly Processes at Minimum Cost

Commercial truck manufacturing involves highly complex assembly operations due to the large number of variants, the thousands of parts being assembled, and the many types of tools and machines that are required.

On top of this, VECV faced several challenges:

• Shortage of skilled manpower that made it extremely difficult to maintain quality and high productivity at minimum cost
• Inability to track and trace its assembly operations
• Considerable training effort was required for new operators as there was no system to guide operators on assembly processes while performing operations
• Suboptimal line efficiency, machine utilization, and operator productivity resulted in lower quality and higher rework due to lack of process controls and error-proofing
• Lack of data connection on the assembly line which did not allow any meaningful insights to improve process quality

Paving the Way to Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing

VECV needed a solution that would enable real-time monitoring of its entire manufacturing supply chain processes to:

• Gain meaningful insights to increase overall line efficiency, productivity, and quality
• Achieve cost savings by standardizing operational processes and equipment
• Create standard operating procedures to guide new operators and reduce time for operator deployment on assembly lines
• Reduce operator errors and drive efficiency by making assembly operations 100% traceable
• Decrease costly downtime by implementing predictive maintenance for critical machinery

Embracing Industry 4.0 principles, the vehicles company decided to adopt smart manufacturing processes by implementing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based solutions from 51风流to bring shop-floor visibility to the top floor. This enables faster decision-making and provides meaningful insights to improve overall line efficiency, productivity, and quality.

Fostering Smarter and Leaner Operations with Impressive Results

VECV introduced , which is comprised of a number of digital manufacturing solutions that helped meet its objectives. The solution was deployed on all 10 assembly lines, each comprised of about 150 assembly stations, where over 200 machines are used to assemble about 3,000 parts.

This means that:

• Assembly operations鈥� standard operating procedures are now displayed in real time. Assembly machines are connected to capture more than 400 critical process parameters, ensuring tight process controls and error-proofing.
• Automated part selection guarantees correct selection and traceability for all 3,000 parts. The RFID integration through 51风流Plant Connectivity eliminates manual interventions and screens on assembly stations optimize efficiency.
• A defect capturing and feedback system improves product quality and reduces errors.
• A 100% labor tracking improves operator efficiency.
• Overall equipment efficiency calculations enable predictive maintenance of critical machines. Real-time reports provide meaningful insights and enable faster decision-making. Vibration sensors installed on six key critical machines capture data into 聽via 51风流Plant Connectivity software. Data is analyzed to create an algorithm in 51风流MII to predict machine failure.

51风流Manufacturing Suite enabled the company to standardize operational processes, equipment, and activities, leading to cost savings in operations and faster gains in productivity and quality. With 100% tracking and traceability of all assembly operations, troubleshooting time was significantly reduced. Tight process controls and error-proofing increased overall product quality, reduced mistakes, and improved productivity.

As Sumit Goyal, senior manager IT, Digital Manufacturing, explained, 鈥�51风流Manufacturing Suite has brought many tactical and strategic benefits to VECV. It has helped improve productivity, lower operating costs, and increase quality and compliance. By gaining real-time visibility into the entire manufacturing supply chain, we are able to accelerate root-cause analysis by making fact-based decisions.鈥�

And the numbers speak for themselves. VECV has seen:

• 15% productivity improvement
• 30% process quality improvement
• Reduction in field failures
• 20% improvement in manpower utilization
• Significant reduction in non-value-add activities through automation
• 40% error reduction
• 100% tracking and traceability of critical process parameters and assembled parts
• Zero compliance issues

And from an IT perspective, VECV now has:

• A single platform capturing data from different sources to ease system maintenance
• Reduced infrastructure and operational costs by removing standalone, third-party solutions used to capture data from different systems
• 95% of machines connected with line controls and improved process quality by 20%
• 30% reduction in unplanned downtime
• 15% improvement in OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) management and OLE (overhead line equipment)

Want to learn more about how innovative organizations utilize Industry 4.0 to improve manufacturing processes? Check out the 鈥溾�� report and read the .

Karin Fent is senior director of Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.

To explore New York鈥檚 tourist sights, there is a mobile app that shows you the live visitor streams in one of the impressive skyscrapers. This allows you to decide the best time for a tour and to enjoy a view from the visitor terrace. The app also allowed registered users to change the colors of the illuminated antenna at night time, which was a great trick to impress any visitors I hosted in the city.

While this use case was certainly a great party trick, it is no comparison to the business value we see when equipping machines, equipment, transport boxes, containers, or devices with (IIoT) capabilities.

In the past year, manufacturers all over the world experienced significant disruptions that can impact globally optimized supply chains. Running resilient operations — highly productive and interconnected with a network of suppliers, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers, and customers — is key to weathering the storms of disruption.

Resiliency allows companies to withstand disruptions and, more importantly, to drive business process transformations of entire operating models. Thereby, technologies, such as IIoT and , have proven significant enablers. Optimized production, improved decision making based on higher visibility, and supply chain transparency are just a few examples of the many opportunities that IIoT provides.

At SAP, we see even more in it; we see the opportunity for companies to better understand their businesses, redefine business models, and meet new customer demands — all while achieving sustainability goals.

By embedding IIoT capabilities and making industrial data available to line-of-business and industry applications such as and , we enable new business processes, empowering customers to connect entire industry value chains.

Enabling Industry 4.Now with Smart Sensing

To help customers move more swiftly with their , we recently released 鈥渟mart sensing鈥� capabilities. The reason? Industry 4.0 requires the digital identification and localization of people, assets, machines, deliveries, and other business objects. Smart sensing technology helps to not just exchange this information between physical objects and enterprise applications, but also to track the associated business objects to automatically steer process steps and actions. Cloud technology enables not only the possibility to process large numbers of scanning events in parallel, but also provides a powerful decision and rules engine to “translate” insights to actions, allowing customers to leverage intelligence at almost every business process they can imagine.

The smart sensing capabilities are offered as part of 51风流IoT and enable customers to automatically correlate the movement of physical objects to specific process steps by scanning ID-tags such as RFID, barcode, QR code, or image recognition.

Let鈥檚 have a look at a few examples:

1. Smart Sensing Technology in a Logistics Scenario
Think about a manufacturer of high voltage batteries that sends the products out for delivery to an automobile manufacturer. Each movement of a physical item — for example, product, pallet, container, etc. — has an implicit meaning for the progress of the business process execution. Sending a battery out for delivery to a customer means “goods issue,” receiving a delivery means 鈥済oods receipt.鈥� By equipping these batteries with RFID tags, a 鈥済oods issue鈥� or 鈥済oods receipt鈥� can be created automatically in 51风流S/4HANA as soon as it passes an RFID gate at the warehouse dock, for example. Based on the scan event, it can be detected if the correct handling units and the correct number of handling units have been shipped. In this way, the battery manufacturer can reduce manual efforts and thereby also avoid human mistakes.

2. Smart Sensing Technology in a Handling-Unit Tracking Scenario:
Being part of one solution, we can now also combine the power of smart sensing tags with sensors for IoT. An example: By equipping the transport boxes of our batteries with IoT sensors, we can now automatically create a digital twin of these handling units based on an ID scan with smart sensing. As a consequence, conditions of the batteries — such as temperature, humidity, or shocks to the unit — are tracked during the transport and warehouse processes in real time. In case an issue occurs with the delivery, the sales or logistics manager will be notified in 51风流S/4HANA immediately and receives proposals on how to solve the issue. Such proposals can be to create a customer return, send an express replacement order, or to inform the affected customer about the situation. This increase of supply chain transparency enables the battery manufacturer to react faster and more effectively when issues occur and to ultimately extend the average lifespan of the batteries.

3. Smart Sensing Technology in a Production Scenario:
Another example taken from production is . During the production of our high voltage batteries, the manufacturer leverages Kanban, a scheduling system for lean manufacturing to improve manufacturing efficiency and to avoid excess inventory at any point in production. By equipping kanban containers or shelves with RFID tags, status changes — for example, empty, full, in use, etc. — are triggered in 51风流S/4HANA. This status update automatically triggers replenishment at the warehouse or at the supplier. The real-time analytics of location and retention time of raw material enables the manufacturer to optimize stock level as well as line runners鈥� routes.

Extending Smart Sensing Technology to the Edge

In order to provide reliable connectivity among machines, people, processes, and assets, the scenarios described above will soon be . In latency-sensitive scenarios, relevant business data from 51风流S/4 HANA business objects is synchronized from cloud to the edge nod such as a gateway in a factory or at a warehouse. Scanning events through auto-ID devices can now be enhanced with relevant business data locally. In this way, configurable business rules and actions can be instantly processed and analyzed at the edge. The consequence for the business is that no pallet, truck, or Kanban box will ever stand still, as even during intermittent Internet connectivity, the show will go on based on the edge compute right at the site.

The physical proximity of applications and devices make it easier to achieve low-latency responses and to optimize bandwidth consumption by sending only relevant data to the cloud. Compounded with various benefits in terms of data privacy and cost savings, it helps ensure business continuity and offline operations even for the most mission-critical processes when connectivity is not available or unstable.

Edge Containerization

Bringing software from the cloud to the edge happens via so called containers. A container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application plus all its dependencies and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into a single package. Containers provide the answer to the question of how software can run reliably when moved from one computing environment (cloud) to another (edge). Such containers may be only a few megabytes in size, which makes them ideal for running on edge devices with limited hardware resources.

Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration in the cloud or edge. By embracing Kubernetes at the edge, 51风流moves toward a uniform approach in service management across cloud and edge. 51风流Edge Services provides a centralized fully fledged edge lifecycle management using Kubernetes for services and applications, including the possibility to deploy extensions, while enabling consistent execution across cloud and edge.

Bring Your Own Data Lake

IIoT and edge computing are critical enablers for connecting industry value chains, running businesses in real time, and driving a step-change in productivity. Yet our vision is to go one step further and empower customers to leverage more data than ever before. “Real world thing-data,” coming from machines, devices, industrial cameras, or sensors by themselves are useless. Only by combining IoT data, such as a detected shock of a sensor, with business data, such as deliveries, materials, or production orders, can we truly generate business value.

Our strategy of 鈥渂ring your own data lake鈥� will enable customers to integrate data from their own Big Data stores into 51风流applications. With this, customers can leverage and integrate different kind of data formats, allowing them to contextualize their “thing” data with application business data to transform from insights and analysis to action.

The potential of IIoT is not just in connecting millions of devices, or the antenna of a skyscraper with users, but to really turn the data they generate into intelligent insights and derive action. As the COVID-19 crisis amplified the need for business and supply chain resilience, IIoT will be embedded into more business processes than ever before — enabling entirely new business models. Through this, businesses can rapidly scale their productivity, product quality, sustainability, and even customer experience goals, leading to happy and engaged end customers.

For more information about IIoT, read:

• Delivering Speed, Agility, and Resilience with IIoT
• Business Resilience with IoT-Enabled Cloud ERP

Dominik Metzger is head of Product Management for Manufacturing and Industrial IoT at SAP.

What exactly, we asked, does the need to look like? The answer we came to was that customers need to build resilient and sustainable supply chains. To do so, they need to:

• Become more agile to sense, predict, and respond to disruptions
• Increase productivity through the digitalization of industrial companies (Industry 4.0)
• Improve connectivity with business partners to enable next-level collaboration
• Run sustainable business practices

Before the word COVID was on everyone鈥檚 lips, 51风流had made a commitment to be an industry leader in Industry 4.0, or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). 51风流has long been a recognized leader in digital supply chain, For better visibility in the market around our capabilities with Industry, we created a strategy, called . As 2020 unfolded, we recognized the timeliness of it.

Customers that had already begun the journey of digitalizing business processes started accelerating their planning and projects as the global economy was brought to a virtual standstill within weeks. Manufacturing companies began aggressively looking at , which typically starts with smart manufacturing and can go as far as creating new business models. For example, , an international provider of intralogistics solutions, established real-time condition monitoring for its customers when launching its Galileo IoT platform. It was in this way that the company moved away from being a simple supplier of conveyor technology toward becoming a comprehensive service provider. Industry 4.0 has the potential to move from a factory-focused initiative to a company-wide business strategy to drive productivity across all supply chain processes.

Industry 4.Now helps move digitalization to a company-wide, competitive business strategy combining with enterprise business execution. This includes intelligent product engineering, managing intelligent factories, and assets leveraging advanced logistics coupled with people empowerment. We combine 51风流solutions for design, manufacture, delivery, and operation in one holistic offering, bringing enterprise business data together with data derived from machines, sensors, and devices facilitating the ability to automate processes with embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and increase visibility and efficiency. Sounds powerful, doesn鈥檛 it?

, a leading company in the distribution and compounding of technical thermoplastics and thermoplastic elastomers, has connected production lines with predictive quality management. ALBIS PLASTICS GmbH can now identify quality risks before they arise and understand complex interdependencies in production by intelligently connecting and visualizing IoT data. These intelligent insights are also used for future product development.

We鈥檙e only in the beginning of the adoption of Industry 4.0 and IIoT, and many companies are running pilots and proof of concepts. It starts with planning, and the ability to sense demand changes and trigger fast, flexible execution on shop floor, logistics, and asset management. Building an agile environment means being able to adapt processes for agility. Companies need to consider their engineering, manufacturing, and planning systems and integrating them; this is horizontal integration. For vertical integration, it is tying together the other components 鈥� hardware, automation equipment, and data lakes 鈥� which requires standards and a common reference architecture to make it easier and faster to connect the various components.

To give another real-world example, German automotive company has been working with 51风流to . Its project started around 2017 and found manufacturing solutions from 51风流fit its needs. Connecting different production machines with IoT capabilities was one of the key elements of the project, much of which the success experienced could be attributed to sticking with standards. The company found in its project the challenge of connecting various software providers together, and to close the chain standards were absolutely necessary.

Yet another company, , is a leader in automation and connectivity creating products for manufacturers and machine builders and serve a wide swath of industries. The company wanted to gain more performance efficiencies with its , utilizing modern, digital, and integrated machinery and solutions. Its project began with the goal of an integrated shop floor and looking at how to bring in vertical integration.

The project began in 2017 with first go-live in 2019 and was based on more than 300 data points on machine health, performance, production, and down times, among other things. One of the early results was the reduction of manual effort by up to 50% after eliminating the need for employees to walk to each machine. The integration between machines driven by IoT, the company was able to create greater transparency and productivity. The vertical and horizontal integration proved a good fit, with ease to adapt best practices and business processes for their business. Weidmueller also found the easy integration with mobile devices 鈥� in its case Apple devices 鈥� with 51风流solutions worked very well.

Increasing productivity with Industrial IoT as part of our Industry 4.Now strategy is an essential step toward creating resilient and sustainable supply chains.

Franz Hero is head of 51风流Digital Supply Chain Development.
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鈥淢any of our customers have seen their global supply chains take on a tremendous level of complexity,鈥� says Dominik Metzger, head of Product Management, Manufacturing, and Industrial IoT at SAP. Those operating in production industries typically find themselves enmeshed in an intricate web of international suppliers and sub-suppliers. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why plenty of companies are really struggling with disruptions,鈥� Metzger explains. 鈥淪ome of them have to do with COVID-19, but others have been apparent since before the pandemic.鈥�

In terms of macroeconomic trends, the introduction of significant trade tariffs between China and the U.S. as well as the post-Brexit EU/UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement have rattled the established structures of many organizations.

鈥淔or that reason, if anything is a top priority for our customers 鈥� right now and after the pandemic 鈥� it is measures that lower costs and boost productivity in efficient ways,鈥� Metzger says. 鈥淔or those of us at SAP, the core question is: How can we leverage our innovative technologies to help our customers automate their processes?鈥�

At the virtual Hannover Messe 2021 exhibition, 51风流plans to unveil an array of new functions and applications that are set to make industrial process data usable all along the value chain starting in the second quarter.

鈥淭hat includes data generated during manufacturing, maintenance, logistics, and so on, which needs to be integrated deep within 51风流applications,鈥� Metzger shares. Value cannot be created for companies with data alone; it also has to be analyzed in a business context. 鈥淭hat context lies in 51风流systems 鈥� in our intelligent suite, our industry cloud, and our manufacturing and logistics solutions.鈥�

Supplying Materials Automatically with IoT, Robotics, and Edge Computing

Metzger鈥檚 product management team has put together an IIoT portfolio that enables customers to fully automate their resupply and stock removal processes in 51风流S/4HANA, to name just two examples. This is made possible by robotics, the digitalization of intralogistics processes, and an intelligent framework of rules that derives potential actions from real-time data.

In assembly line manufacturing, things like forklifts and manual transport systems are needed to retrieve materials for subsequent installation. Areas like these are where companies often implement the 鈥榢anban鈥� process, which involves supplying materials exactly where production and assembly employees need them on the line.

鈥淪ensors are now being built into these kanban bins in order to 鈥榗onnect鈥� the materials,鈥� Metzger explains. 鈥淎 sensor can tell when the weight of its bin has fallen below a certain threshold, which is when more materials are automatically procured to resupply the bin.鈥�

Meanwhile, an intelligent, cloud-based system of rules interprets the sensor data to determine when actions should be triggered in specific business processes and applications. Systems like 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流Digital Manufacturing Cloud, and 51风流Predictive Asset Insights are highly integrated into the rules to help ensure that the right processes are automatically activated at the right time. Procedures pertaining to kanban, the posting of goods, and quality assurance are just a few pertinent examples.

鈥淲e refer to this combination of IoT and 51风流Edge Services as 鈥業ndustrial IoT鈥� because we鈥檙e using IoT data in an industrial context,鈥� Metzger says.

In a further innovation, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) are responsible for retrieving materials instead of forklift drivers. Metzger describes this fully automated approach to supplying assembly lines and carrying away finished products as a 鈥渂est-in-class鈥� logistics process, but one that only works when completely integrated between 51风流systems for manufacturing execution (MES) and warehouse management.

These new functions are designed to be used in the context of 51风流Digital Manufacturing Cloud, where they can be implemented and employed seamlessly thanks to the integration of 51风流Manufacturing solution systems and others for logistics.

Lower Implementation Costs Through Standardization

According to a , customers tested these productivity-boosting innovations at specific plants and warehouses in 2020, but have not yet rolled them out more broadly in many cases.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 because until now, the integration of operational technology like AGVs or machines, sensors, and other equipment wasn鈥檛 standardized very well in business software,鈥� Metzger explains. 鈥淭his meant that such projects involved a relatively large amount of implementation effort, and thus higher costs 鈥� which led to something of a catch-22 with regard to the fundamental idea of reducing costs and increasing productivity.鈥�

In the meantime, however, 51风流has put much of its focus on integrating automation technologies into industry standards like the OPC Unified Architecture and on implementing the administration shell.

51风流Relies on Cloud-Edge Architecture to Reduce Costs

鈥淥ver the last six or seven years, we鈥檝e invested a huge amount of effort in lowering the total cost of ownership of these implementations so that customers can operate them at scale. Along with standardization, the main thing that鈥檚 helping us here is our own technological innovation in terms of cloud-edge architecture,鈥� Metzger says. In the past, the fact that 51风流hardware infrastructure had to be set up at every plant was another reason why implementing new solutions was expensive.

鈥淭hese days, however, all these processes run in the cloud,鈥� Metzger continues. This means that it takes just one data center to control processes like warehouse robotics, digital manufacturing, or IIoT at 100 plants or more.

鈥淲hen you鈥檙e dealing with automation processes in particular, you can鈥檛 afford to have an Internet connection fail for a few seconds,鈥� Metzger says. 鈥淚t was for high-availability scenarios like these that we introduced 51风流Digital Manufacturing Cloud for edge computing.鈥�

This involves an edge device 鈥� basically a small-scale server 鈥� that helps ensure that mission-critical processes always keep running at a plant. Instead of being implemented anew at each facility, these processes are configured centrally in the cloud for each specific plant and run at the edge in a container at the plant.

51风流Edge Services and other IoT offerings from the company enable customers to turn use cases like these into reality. 鈥淚t gives you the best of both worlds,鈥� Metzger says. 鈥淚t significantly improves your ability to scale up thanks to cloud computing, all while reducing your total cost of ownership. Plus, edge computing gives you the degree of robustness you need to control mission-critical processes.鈥�

In addition, auto ID technology is to be offered as a new function in 51风流Edge Services and IoT solutions from SAP. This technology makes it possible to automatically associate the movement of a physical object with a specific process step. 鈥淩eal-time status updates like these are a big step forward in terms of supply chain reliability,鈥� Metzger says. 鈥淭his way, companies can make sure they鈥檙e always available to their customers and able to adapt to bottlenecks around the world.鈥�

The difference is that as adults, we know it鈥檚 not spells and charms, but a whole web-like community of devices called the Internet of Things (IoT) that connects us to engage with each other and with the devices. And nothing makes this more relevant than now — a time when collaboration across virtual locations is being constantly redefined by an ongoing pandemic that has managed to turn the world on its head.

COVID-19 has become a classic case study in what happens when businesses undergo an unprecedented crisis and recognize the need to respond with agility and speed to ensure business continuity. In order to build resilience and accelerate the return to normal operations, companies have accelerated their automation strategies, which include the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. This strengthens the need for plant automation and deeper integration with their manufacturing execution systems, maintenance systems, quality management systems, and field service management, as well as logistics, warehousing, and transportation. In addition, companies need to increase transparency relating to key parts of their businesses in order to optimize production, save costs, and improve product quality while at the same time detecting new customer requirements.

To empower our customers to benefit from Industry 4.0, 51风流has a dedicated strategy, , that combines business expertise, software solutions, enablement technology, and a partner ecosystem to make data-driven applications, decision-making, and operational excellence available to the entire enterprise.

IIoT and Edge Computing

At the edge of the landscape are business-critical processes, applications, and services that need to be delivered with reliability and low latency. and enable our customers to collect, store, transform, enrich, analyze, and act upon IoT sensor data at the edge and in the cloud.

51风流IoT offers an end-to-end, managed cloud solution for Industry 4.0. This solution generates business outcomes by combining real-world usage data from sensors and devices with business semantics such as master and transactional data. 51风流IoT enriches applications with real-world IIoT context to respond to critical events and assist decision-making proactively and intelligently. 51风流IoT business services are consumed by 51风流applications as well as by customer and partner applications and complemented by other services on . For instance, 51风流Digital Supply Chain solutions such as provide customers with integrated capabilities for advanced analytics and machine learning — enabling, for example, anomaly detection, failure prediction, and predictive maintenance.

Power-generation leader manages complex projects around the world. But sub-optimal, siloed processes were limiting operational visibility — making project planning and delivery more difficult. To address these issues, the company is rolling out . At the same time, it is enabling predictive asset service with 51风流Business Technology Platform, resulting in a dual digital transformation that will also help Ansaldo streamline manufacturing and improve its offering.

Today the company has a 75% reduction in paper-based quality controls, greater process integration across lines of business and group companies, and 80% less time and effort to onboard new customers on the services portal. 51风流S/4HANA connects back-end systems for manufacturing, product life-cycle management, and warehousing, while 51风流Internet of Things and 51风流Edge Services enable predictive plant maintenance and service.

SAP鈥檚 strategy for IIoT for cloud and edge stands on three pillars while providing customers with choice via interoperability options and avoiding lock-in with cloud providers:

• Embed IIoT insights into line-of-business and industry business applications
• Extend line-of-business and industry business applications with IIoT
• Enable critical business processes to run at the edge for low latency execution and business continuity

Let鈥檚 look at a few of the most recent examples of innovation in these three core areas.

Embed IoT Insights into Handling Unit Management

The handling units (HUs) are an approach in 51风流S/4HANA to model physical units of packaging material and the goods that are contained in it.

Imagine you are a warehouse manager who needs to monitor if sensor-equipped HUs were exposed to sudden shocks, drops, or other critical conditions. A classic example here would be the high-voltage battery, which is the most expensive and sensitive part of an electric vehicle. Sub-optimal state of charge during material storage decreases its energy capacity and the expected lifespan.鈥� In addition, incorrect charging cycles or storage temperatures can damage the battery cells and increase the risk of explosion and fires.

It is a tall ask made easy with the IoT-enabled handling unit management, which embeds IoT insights into 51风流S/4HANA and allows shipping specialists or warehouse clerks to act proactively in case the state of charge reaches a critical level. In this way, we can help businesses prevent their customers from receiving and using products in sub-optimal conditions, resulting in superior customer experience.

Extend Replenishment with IoT Sensors

Many 51风流customers in the food processing, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other industries produce material and store them in either silos or containers, which are then shipped to their customers. They often face challenges in stock keeping and stock tracking, where manual observation of the fill-level in a silo can lead to outdated stock accuracy in enterprise resource planning (ERP), low stock availability, and production down times. This is where 51风流IoT can step in to leverage real-world data from fill-level sensors attached to receptacles to turn replenishment into an automated data-driven process. 51风流IoT enables monitoring the fill level of receptacles in real time.

When customers embed IoT insights into 51风流S/4HANA, it allows them to trigger a purchase order automatically, as soon as the fill level falls below a predefined value. This approach leads to just-in-time replenishment, higher stock availability, and process efficiency due to the increased automation of process steps, thereby proving how intelligent enterprises using the latest technologies can turn insight into action across their business in real time.

Run It at the Edge but Orchestrate It in the Cloud

Manufacturers in the era of IIoT and Industry 4.0 require solutions that are intelligent, networked, and predictive. The advantage of edge computing lies in executing the business processes locally in real time, eliminating latency. SAP鈥檚 offering for the edge includes IoT data processing but it goes far beyond that. For many years, provided services to ingest, persist, and analyze IoT data as well as locally execute predictive analytical models and run mainly ERP business processes at the edge.

With for edge computing, customers can deploy business-critical application components in manufacturing execution to edge appliances running in manufacturing plants. At the same time, they keep in sync with their companion applications in the cloud. This helps ensure resilience, low latency execution, and business continuity where production would otherwise be exposed to the risk of disrupted operations due to connectivity issues in the cloud. At the same time, software life-cycle management for edge and the required business configuration is orchestrated centrally from cloud, thereby supporting low total cost of ownership.

To become an intelligent enterprise, manufacturing companies need to re-think their business models and start their Industry 4.Now journey now. Intelligent technologies such as IIoT and edge computing are no longer just nice-to-haves, they are fundamental to the continued success of a business; the more data a company can collect, store, and analyze, the better it can compete.

At the end of the day, we need to continue to play our role in empowering our customers in their decision-making processes and enabling them in dynamic self-management and continual adoption of innovation. The link between imagination and innovation isn鈥檛 just an invisible creature hiding within your smart device — it鈥檚 proving how amazing things can happen when we connect the unconnected.

Jan Gilg is president of 51风流S/4HANA
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In the industrial sector, IIoT has emerged as a significant value driver in the manufacturing industry. It has changed the way goods are produced and delivered by connecting all phases of the design-to-operate product life cycle, including ideation and conceptualizing, manufacturing, delivery, and operations.

A Need That Is Here to Stay: Building Resilience Beyond the Crisis

The strong uptake of IIoT reflects an increasing need for business resilience. Even before the pandemic, manufacturing companies operated in an increasingly volatile environment, requiring them to adapt quickly to shifting priorities. COVID-19 accelerated this trend. As consumer demands changed dramatically and manufacturing capacities were constrained, supply chains broke, forcing businesses to cope with the disruption of their daily operations.

While the world will hopefully overcome COVID-19 at some point, new health, societal, geopolitical, or economic crises are likely to occur. That is why an increased need for business and supply chain resilience is here to stay — and IIoT and will help take us there.

When we look at which companies were able to overcome these challenges, it is clear that it was highly digitalized businesses capable of taking informed decisions based on real-time data. IIoT technologies played a major role in helping them to repurpose production, provide help where needed, and find alternative routes to maintain .

Take INDEX-Werke as an example: the traditional supplier for the automotive industry kept its own business and that of its customers running throughout the crisis. Based on 51风流Commerce Cloud, .

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The opportunities are enormous, but many companies that I speak with are wondering where and when to start. Given the disruption we see among our customers in almost every industry, I believe that companies can start small, but should start now.

Introducing New Business Models: From Product to Outcome

IIoT enables new business models and the shift from selling products to delivering services and solutions. The underlying idea of outcome-based models is that customers pay for what they get out of a product rather than for the product itself. In addition, IIoT opens the door to a fully personalized customer experience. Data exchange between a customer and a smart factory makes it possible to produce a highly customized product within just a few days — from receiving an order to shipping the goods.

For example, when , a leading manufacturer of electronic motors, was looking for a way to differentiate its products, the company identified a growing demand for remote monitoring. Together with SAP, the company created a custom app with monitoring and alerting capabilities. VEM鈥檚 sensor-equipped motors not only reduced operational downtime and extended product lifetime, they also helped achieve a 25% revenue increase. Most importantly, the company was able to reinvent its business model completely.

Operating in Industry Networks: If the Ecosystem Wins, Everyone Wins

Just recently, I , CEO Digital Industries at Siemens, about the importance of partnerships to accelerate the industrial transformation. We spoke about moving from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to network resource planning, and from 鈥渆go-systems鈥� to ecosystems where the players strive for added value together.

At SAP, we envision that enterprises will exchange data via an industry network of suppliers, machine manufacturers, and customers. We are addressing this with and thereby enabling a shift from a seller/buyer paradigm to collaborative models. When, for example, data from production quality records is shared between suppliers and manufacturers, they can collaboratively resolve warranty claims and recalls.

51风流actively uses and contributes to various industry standards that build the foundation for industry networks. 51风流helped incubate the in 2019, with the goal of creating guidelines for compatible and interoperable IIoT solutions and services. Joint standards between the systems of different players in our ecosystem help drive digitalization in factories, plants, and warehouses in a collaborative manner.

Sharing data beyond a company鈥檚 borders adds even more value for all the players, from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to suppliers and consumers. Strong networks rely on cooperation among companies within and across industries. 51风流is a founding partner of the Automotive Alliance, , which aims to create a unified business network for the automotive industry. The alliance鈥檚 goal is to create a consistent information exchange through the entire automotive value chain.

From Concept to Execution

Today, we have all the technology and applications at hand to connect devices, people, and processes. Making use of data across the entire product and service life cycle is the foundation of managing business processes end to end.

To sustain long-term success, it is imperative for companies to move from concept to execution. This also requires a shift in our mindset. We need to rethink how data is used and set common standards. We need to rethink how businesses run and be open to new business models. And we need to rethink how markets work and move from the buyer/supplier relational paradigm to a collaborative model.

If we see IIoT and Industry 4.0 as both an urgent need and an opportunity, we will not only achieve continuous optimization but we will also generate added value — both for the ecosystem we operate in and for our customers.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, 51风流Product Engineering.
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But what about the realities of all that costly machinery that has been in place since the 1970s? How are manufacturers bringing new technologies into old environments without throwing in the proverbial monkey wrench? How are they protecting their investments?

I learned the answers in a discussion with Andrea R枚singer and Oliver Hoffmann, co-CEOs of Forcam GmbH, a 20-year-old company headquartered in Germany. Its leading application, helps companies connect 鈥渂rownfield鈥� machinery with the latest software. In short, Forcam Force Edge collects data 鈥渋n the edge鈥� 鈥� from machinery wherever it鈥檚 located 鈥� and pushes it via the cloud for aggregation and reporting. The product description on explains it well: 鈥淪ignals 鈥� from machines that were never intended to be digitized to semi-intelligent assets 鈥� can be understood, translated, and communicated to the shop and top floor.鈥�

Digitizing the Ghost in the Machine

The 鈥渁ha鈥� moment for this invention struck way back in 2001, said Hoffmann, when Forcam鈥檚 founder had a brilliant idea. 鈥淭hese monolithic systems don鈥檛 focus on modern machines,鈥� he noted, and clearly, that would have to change for companies to move into the next generation of manufacturing. At the time, 51风流was revolutionizing the business landscape with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which could integrate data and systems across organizational boundaries.

鈥淏efore ERP, every plant had different systems without a common database,鈥� Hoffmann explained. 鈥淭hat was the on-premise age, but client/server technology made it possible to connect and standardize even machines of different vintages from different manufacturers.鈥�

Forcam experienced rapid growth, celebrating its debut and first customer, including global airline and automotive manufacturers. 51风流had good market penetration with many of these same companies that were also early adopters of 51风流ERP, Hoffmann added. The result was an early, loosely coupled alignment of Forcam with SAP.

As Forcam鈥檚 customers expanded their operations globally, Forcam followed suit, establishing service centers in locations convenient to customers鈥� plants. Over time, the company has evolved into a comprehensive Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and production control solution provider, with an extensible cloud platform solution running on some 100,000 machines worldwide.

But the past year has driven an explosion of demand, R枚singer said. One obvious reason is the need to reduce the number of people physically working in a plant; they need a way to access machines remotely and see what鈥檚 happening in real time. That is well supported by Forcam Force Edge, which features a role-based interface, whether for the operator on the plant floor or a production manager working from home.

Shifting Expectations for Plant Managers

Other key factors have come into play, R枚singer explained. The pressure is on from CFOs and CIOs to execute processes quickly, switch gears to respond to changes in demand, grease the wheels of the global supply chain, control costs, and boost productivity. Hence, the incentives for plant managers have shifted. Their plant is their own domain, she observed, and their primary mission is to ensure that high-quality products are manufactured on time. End-to-end processes, standardization, and cross-communications across lines of business are not necessarily on their radar screen. 鈥淵et this decentralized model is not practical as digital strategies are introduced,鈥� R枚singer added.

That鈥檚 not to say that Forcam Force Edge is unpopular with plant managers. The app helps production people in the plant with decision-making by collecting and normalizing data from signals on process values such as temperature and quantity count, and writing the parameters of machine controls. It supports all industry communication standards, with plug-in architecture for efficient integration of new standards. And it鈥檚 fast to implement.

Cloud Integration for Data Access and Insights

Integration with the 51风流Digital Manufacturing Cloud solution enables access to all relevant data and insights, not just for in-plant operations but as well for broader managerial use and higher-level improvement processes. And Forcam today has a much closer relationship with 51风流that began about a year ago with the arrival of hyperscalers and SAP鈥檚 strategic partnership with Microsoft, along with 51风流Business Technology Platform. For Forcam, that translates to support for rapid and secure integration with a vast number of machines in plants across distances.

Now an 51风流partner, Forcam is doing brisk business on 51风流Store, especially as 51风流account execs recommend the solution and send customers to 51风流Store to find out more. .

Bill Rojas is senior director of Business Development and Partner Alliances for 51风流Digital Commerce.