The Digital Twin of the Vehicle: SAP’s Industry Cloud heralding a new era of innovation | Part 2

[sscharfenberger]

Just like the butterfly emerges out of the chrysalis, becoming something completely different to its original form of the caterpillar. The same concept can be applied to business processes and networks. Here, emergence describes how superior features or structures of a system can be developed as a result of the interaction of its elements. These new features cannot - or at least not obviously - be traced back to features of the original individual elements. This idea comes from older Greek philosophy and is applied in science as well as social and economic systems. It is seen as one of the major drivers of innovation in modern business processes and networks.

Innovation – Life Blood for Automotive Companies

Innovation is widely recognized as the economic growth driver of the future. New technologies are a main catalyst, enabling new business opportunities and helping to drive new strategic priorities. The overall goal for both initiatives is to grow the business and increase revenue with new innovations. A lot of today’s most substantial innovations are being created by a new generation of businesses that are almost entirely digital. These companies are harnessing technology to offer more attractive products and services, changing the competitive landscape intensely. This means traditional companies have to innovate as a matter of survival. While innovation has always been an integral part of the automotive industry, digitalization is changing the very nature of the innovative process. It is impacting every aspect of business, including how companies today innovate, evolve and grow.

How to win in the race for revolutionary evolution?

SAP believes that by helping their customers become intelligent enterprises, it can support them in their innovation journey. Companies need to be much more responsive & agile and be able to quickly transform data into action across all lines of business. In many discussions with customers, the “Industry Business Unit Automotive” has found 5 strategic priorities that automotive customers focus on to become intelligent enterprises (refer also to the automotive spotlight😞

Customer Centricity – to achieve higher customer satisfaction

Digital Supply Chain and Smart Factory – to obtain cost reduction of production assets

Engaging the changing workforce – to increase productivity and faster skill development

Mobility Services – to grow within new revenue streams

Connected Cars – to uplift visibility along the entire value chain

The recently released “SAP Digital Vehicle Hub powered by SAP Asset Intelligence Network” (DVH), directly addresses the last two priorities, Connected Car and Mobility Services.



The Digital Vehicle Hub is part of the SAP industry cloud strategy. It is the platform that enables SAP and partners to deliver industry specific cloud solutions that help to unlock new levels of efficiency, extend end-to-end business processes at the edge, and enable innovative business models in an agile manner. In other words, it can be taken as a joint innovation space as business innovations are driven by everyone – customers, partners, and SAP. It starts with ideas: how to fix a problem, how to discover and unlock new value, how to deliver new business outcomes. Translating an idea into a business process or a solution needs an innovation space that comes with digital tools and content to build and deliver quickly and predictably. The Digital Vehicle Hub was designed with the same concepts in mind. From the very beginning we understood that stand-alone applications often struggle to deliver ongoing business value. Enterprise applications always need access to essential business domains such as e.g. the products (in this case vehicles), service providers, employees, and customers. SAP’s industry cloud provides direct access to all business domains and processes within the Intelligent Suite while its business technology platform provides the tools and infrastructure to create and run pioneering industry cloud solutions. Its embedded, secure & authorized sharing functionality creates a business network leveraging the single source or truth of vehicle data. This enables agile ways to collaborate and create additional or new value streams by partnering with stakeholders along the entire value chain. The SAP Digital Vehicle Hub – is one of the first SAP industry cloud solutions to be delivered. It is also one of the first solutions on the market that enables a digital twin of a vehicle along the entire automotive value chain.

SAP Digital Vehicle Hub

Innovation is going to continue to be critical for the automotive industry. Emerging solutions, such as the Digital Vehicle Hub, will help customers in the wider automotive context to capitalize on new opportunities and business models.

In our next and last post, we are super thrilled to present insights into the Digital Vehicle Hub and the wide range of use cases it supports. Stay tuned!

This is the second blog post in a series of three. In the first post we focused on the automotive trend of the digital twin of the vehicle. In addition there are deep dive sessions on the SAP Digital Vehicle Hub detailed in the blog post series by our colleagues from SAPs business transformation services.

A big “thank you!” to my colleague Andreas Klaschka, who I worked with writing this blog post. We are both part of the SAP Automotive Industry Business Unit (IBU). The Automotive IBU is a global team that represents SAP in the Industry and is responsible for driving sustainable business growth, customer satisfaction and solution completeness. The IBU Automotive team ensures the delivery of end-to-end solutions for the Automotive industry addressing current and future customer needs, and it enables the sales and consulting organization.