Recent events such as the Suez Canal crisis, the drought in Panama and the German strike wave have once again highlighted the crucial role of a resilient supply chain. It ensures that essential goods and services can still reach consumers, preventing shortages and economic instability. They also enhance a company's ability to adapt to changing market conditions and stay competitive.
In this context, innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly important. By using the latest analytics technologies along the supply chain, companies can make more flexible, faster and more efficient decisions. These technologies have the potential not only to reduce costs, but also to increase customer satisfaction and improve competitiveness.
For example, by using AI in the supply chain, companies can access a variety of data sources, such as real-time sensor data, historical transaction data, external market data and more. This data is then analyzed by AI algorithms to identify patterns, trends and correlations. This enables companies to make informed decisions based on comprehensive insights and predictions.
SAP PLM and AI: Transforming Product Lifecycle Management
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has evolved significantly since its inception. Initially centered around engineering or formulation, PLM has grown to encompass a holistic approach, managing every aspect of a product's lifecycle from its idea to its retirement, recycling or remanufacturing. This evolution reflects the changing landscape of product-centric organizations, where the lifecycle of a product is increasingly complex and interconnected.
Today, PLM is an essential pillar in digital transformation strategies across industries and AI in PLM serves as a catalyst for the next generation of product data management practices. For example, with the increasing complexity of customer requirements, companies are faced with the challenge of securing their growth and remaining competitive in the long term through market-oriented decisions.
AI plays a decisive role in revolutionizing the ideation and market research process in product development. Through the targeted use of AI, companies can analyze extensive market data, consumer preferences and trends to effectively optimize their product investment decisions.
With SAP's AI co-pilot, Joule, product developers now use a powerful capability for significantly accelerating the ideation phase, ensuring not only speed but also a higher quality of ideas. By leveraging natural language queries, Joule allows for quick capture and enhancement of product improvement ideas, facilitating a more dynamic and efficient brainstorming process.
Additionally, Joule (AI-Copilot) will support subject matter experts to reduce the time and effort required for accurate data association between CAD data and business data for unparalleled visual analytics with the objective to create visual assets that can be used throughout the supply chain.
In line with the commitment to AI-based innovations, SAP PLM is planning to adopt AI across the entire end-to-end product development process in core areas such as Specification Management, Recipe Formulation, and Enterprise Product Structure Management. By integrating AI in PLM, SAP aims to improve the productivity of engineers and recipe formulators.
AI in digital manufacturing
Industry 4.0 has revolutionized the way products are manufactured. By using IoT sensors, data analysis and automation, companies can optimize their manufacturing processes and make them more flexible. AI plays a key role here by recognizing complex patterns in large data sets and making predictions about production failures, quality issues and bottlenecks.
With SAP Digital Manufacturing, production managers can now utilize large amounts of machine data and integrate AI-powered computer vision into their production processes. This cutting-edge system enables a remarkable increase in quality through automation and boosts efficiency and productivity. At Hannover Messe (HMI), SMA Solar will talk about modernizing their manufacturing execution systems, and how they use the power of AI-enabled visual inspection in SAP Digital Manufacturing to support sustainable, risk-resilient operations.
Asset Performance Management: The future of maintenance
In a world where asset failures can have a major impact on a company's productivity and profitability, preventative asset performance management (APM) is crucial. AI-driven insights are revolutionizing maintenance by making accurate predictions about the condition of assets and optimizing maintenance activities.
And one of the key components of the SAP Asset Performance Management solution is IoT technology. It enables the seamless connection and efficient management of devices and sensor data required for remote asset monitoring, AI and analytics. And with the increasing adoption of 5G technologies, customers worldwide are now increasingly relying on the use of sensor data and smart devices to optimize their maintenance strategies and act on a condition-based and predictive basis.
To help our customers to accelerate this shift, SAP will embed Cumulocity IoT, a market-leading Industrial IoT platform, into SAP Asset Performance Management. With Cumulocity IoT, SAP Asset Performance Management aims to help our customers simplify their connectivity scenarios with any IoT data sources, including smart equipment and data lakes/historians. Moreover, the embedded advanced IoT capabilities can help seamlessly manage IoT devices and stream sensor data in near-real-time to continuously monitor asset health.
With SAP Asset Performance Management, asset operators can now use AI to detect anomalies in equipment behavior from the streaming sensor that can lead to potential failures. This AI-based predictive maintenance capability can be applied to different asset classes and asset types, as it learns based on the asset data of the particular company that uses it, such as for
- filling valves in a beverage production line at a consumer goods manufacturer/retailer
- Air filters on transportation vehicles in a mining operation
- Electric motor in a rotating system at an oil and gas company
AI-driven insights are revolutionizing maintenance by making accurate predictions about the condition of assets and optimizing maintenance activities. And with the help of SAP Asset Performance Management, not only can downtime be reduced, but the service life of assets can also be maximized, and total cost of ownership reduced.
Improve field service response
Today, companies need to optimize their field service management (FSM) processes to remain competitive and increase customer satisfaction. The prediction and optimization of working and travel times at and to the deployment site are a major challenge for companies and their service technicians.
The integration of AI and machine learning into field service management is therefore becoming increasingly important to improve existing processes and open up new opportunities for increasing efficiency and service innovations.
SAP Field Service Management uses predictive routing to access historical and real-time traffic data, as well as service technician location and workload information, to schedule the most efficient route and the most appropriate field service technician. This enables companies to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) more effectively, improve customer satisfaction and reduce operating costs.
Furthermore, SAP Field Service Management uses AI and machine learning to help predict the expected actual job duration to reduce inaccurate scheduling of field service activities, leading to delays, underutilization and negative customer experiences.
This allows planners to create more realistic schedules and minimize overbooking and underutilization of resources, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction and productivity.
In summary, the use of AI and market-driven decision making is essential for product innovation, manufacturing, asset performance management and field service management companies seeking growth and sustainability.
