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Overview
The journey started in the mid-1990s with SAP R/3 and the CPI-C based CAD Interfaces, then over to iPPE, CAD Desktop, SAP PLM 7, SAP ECTR and S/4HANA and now to the new SAP PLM – SAP has constantly been supporting customers in their product development and market introduction efforts. Since the first releases we not only focused on typical PLM topics like CAD data management but also always provided an integrated path into the rest of the enterprise like purchasing or manufacturing.
Software for the Public Cloud now allows additional customer groups like growing enterprises, subsidiaries, country organizations or individual departments to benefit, … especially since we recently introduced a missing key capability in the public cloud-based SAP PLM - the new ‘Product Data Integration’ Software-as-a-Service application for public cloud-based CAD Integration. Together with this CAD Integration, we also provided all necessary enhancements to allow a smooth handover of product structures, routings, and products to SAP S/4HANA Cloud supporting downstream processes like purchasing and manufacturing.
What’s the benefit?
For the first time SAP is now offering a completely public cloud-based suite to support all processes relevant from early product definition and development through to manufacturing. As with all public cloud services, the effort that you need for implementing the software and keeping it up to date is reduced dramatically. In addition, you directly receive all the new features and developments – and not just years later. Several extensibility tools continue to allow you to enhance the software, always following the clean core guidance. Altogether, this makes it easier, especially for smaller units, to get started with software support for your product development processes.
Idea-to-Market
To lower the entry barrier for the implementation of SAP PLM, this all should be as simple as possible – especially since this additional deployment option mainly targets smaller units and smaller implementation partners. To provide additional guidance for the implementation, we now deliver process blueprints on SAP’s Business Accelerator Hub. On the Business Accelerator Hub, you can find reference content for all areas in an enterprise: https://api.sap.com/allprocess , documented by us following the same methodology. You’ll find all information for product development under ‘Idea to Market’. The new solution variant ‘Standard Engineering (Discreet Industries) for Cloud Deployment’ is now available here: https://api.sap.com/package/StandardEngineeringDiscreteIndustriesforPublicCloudDeployment/businesspr.... The four categories of diagrams we provide help you to understand with typical enterprise architecture views which business process scope is covered, which components are involved, how is the data flowing through the integrated system landscape, and more:
- The value flow diagram depicts all business activities supported by the variant
- The component diagram depicts all solution components needed to implement the business process
- The data flow diagram depicts key flows of master and transactional data of the variant
- The process flow diagram, based on the BPMN standard, depicts the process flow and used to specify the collaboration of the different solution components in more detail
From the big picture down to the more detailed process flow diagrams, you as our partners and customers can use this as a template for your implementations.
Several aspects like project management, prototyping, time confirmation will be picked up in future releases. Also engineer-to-order or configure-to-order will be covered in detail later.
What is covered by Idea-to-Market?
The described process starts with an idea for a new product or an improvement resulting from feedback or an ideation campaign. Sometimes you get several similar ideas. Therefore, several ideas can be aggregated into single needs. The ideas and needs are then linked to requirements. With the requirements structuring, a product manager has a clear overview as a basis for a transparent product planning process. From there (mostly for more complex products) either a systems model or a high-level product structure can be directly created. Additionally, CAD engineers can start working on the detailed design and with this also defining the bill-of-material.
Of course, there can be many iterations until the best design is available – these iterations can be managed with SAP PLM’s versioning concept of products and product structures. The built-in visualization service, configuration management, and collaboration features additionally support the development process. Once a certain maturity level has been reached the handover to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition can be started. Only then the missing material masters, routings and bills-of-materials are created in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system for further processing.
In the next weeks we will also roll out this reference flow to SAP Cloud ALM and the SAP Signavio Process Navigator.
Summary
SAP offers simplified access to idea-to-market support in the public cloud, especially for smaller or growing companies or units. Availability of detailed process templates helps our customers and partners reduce project risk and accelerate the project implementation. With the new ‘Idea-to-Market: Standard Engineering (Discrete Industries) for Public Cloud Deployment’, you now have a template process description available. Over time, additional content and variants (ETO, CTO or process industries) will be added as well.
Links:
- SAP Business Accelerator Hub: Business Processes: https://api.sap.com/allprocess
- Idea-to-Market: https://api.sap.com/process/ideaToMarket
- Documentation: https://help.sap.com/docs/I2M?locale=en-US
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