SAP
Canvas Category Software : Information Technology : Enterprise Resource Planning
SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables our customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference.
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How Kaeser Uses AI to Add Customer Value
To start, the project team looked at Kaeser’s master data. “Just to give you one example: our system contains a six-digit number of suppliers, at least two-thirds of whom were inactive,” Lameter says. Maintaining that data manually would have involved a disproportionate amount of effort, which is why many companies hesitate to tackle data projects of this size.
The result was Predicting Inactive Suppliers, a custom AI use case based on one of the SAP AI Services – the Data Attribute Recommendation service – and SAP Analytics Cloud. This solution has enabled Kaeser to automate more than 80% of its data maintenance tasks, improve data accuracy, and achieve significant productivity gains.
But now, Visual Spare Parts Search, a custom AI use case developed in cooperation with nyris, allows Kaeser service technicians to simply take a photo of the needed spare part. The embedded nyris Visual Search AI service uses image recognition to compare uploaded images against the spare parts database and identify the correct asset ID number.
The proportion of SAP Business AI in Kaeser’s data project rose from less than 10% in the first year to over 30% in the third. Today, the team is now 100% focused on SAP Business AI and has developed 12 specific use cases targeted at adding value for customers.
Future-Proof Innovation: Industrial Data Sharing with Manufacturing-X
For example, a manufacturer of robot grippers receives few insights after selling its product about where the grippers are located and what they are used for. If this were not the case, the manufacturer could make much more informed decisions about which generation of products the market needs, or whether a completely new model needs to be developed.
However, customers have concerns that this information could lead to inferences about the nature of their production and the finished product, or that this type of application might be prohibited.
With Manufacturing-X, a scenario has been created in which data sovereignty remains with the owner of the data, but the data can be provided within a narrow framework with a legal and technical structure that prevents abuse. This is the essence of a whole range of use cases in areas such as manufacturing-as-a-service, sustainability, and others.
Within Manufacturing-X, new sovereign data exchange formats are to be created for the industry, based on European Union values such as transparency, controllability, portability, and interoperability. “We work very collaboratively and with a focus on implementation in various industry-specific initiatives to make this vision a reality,” says Mirko Paul, head of Industry Cloud Architecture at SAP. “Based on state-of-the-art, cloud-based architectures and the scalable technology standard of SAP Business Technology Platform, we ensure that these new standards are compatible with SAP applications from the outset and pre-integrated for relevant business processes.”
Unwrapping Hershey’s $250M manufacturing upgrade
The investment aims to digitize and automate Hershey’s processes, optimize procurement and manufacturing, and accelerate R&D and planning to boost visibility and streamline operations. Through the initiative, Hershey will be able to better integrate demand planning and bring more automation to the supply chain.
The lack of visibility prompted Hershey to unify its new business units under a single umbrella through an ERP integration using software provider SAP’s S/4 platform. “S/4 was an important foundation,” Buck said at CAGNY. “It enables us the end-to-end connectivity to better identify where there’s redundancy and take that and complexity out of our system.”
Technology is a pillar of Hershey’s current strategy, and the company appointed its first-ever chief technology officer in 2023. Deepak Bhatia came to Hershey after 12 years at Amazon, where his most recent role was VP of supply chain optimization technologies.
Visibility and real-time data also allow plant managers to proactively maintain lines, advancing the initiative’s goal to optimize manufacturing. Data analytics could reveal the best times to clean equipment so it doesn’t interfere with a production run, or when to replace a part before it breaks and causes longer-term issues.
The AAA initiative is slated for completion in 2026. From there, Hershey expects to save $300 million annually, with 30% of the savings from supply chain productivity. This year alone, Hershey expects to save $100 million, with $10 million coming from supply chain savings and the remainder from SG&A.
AI Agents and Copilots: SAP Introduces Deeper Integrations
SAP has launched collaborative AI agents in Joule, its generative AI copilot, as a further effort to provide deeper integrations across its software ecosystem. SAP’s newest work involves its generative AI capabilities across its ecosystem. Joule, their copilot, provides code explanations, documentation, and collaborative AI agents. The company sees generative AI as applicable for better understanding legacy code.
In addition, SAP has launched a knowledge graph engine that will integrate with Joule to help developers use data more effectively. SAP Knowledge Graph connects the business context captured in SAP applications. The solution anchors SAP’s Joule co-pilot with business data, so it can deliver more reliable, context-aware business insights with far fewer inaccuracies.
SAP Knowledge Graph grounds AI in specific SAP Business semantics and their interrelationships. SAP executives say this reduces the risk of inaccurate and irrelevant results and makes it easier for organizations to build intelligent applications and leverage generative AI more effectively by offering ready-to-use relationships between business entities like purchase orders, invoices, and customers.
The service reduces the complexity of manual data modeling. SAP also introduced new, embedded data lake capabilities for SAP DataSphere. Businesses can store raw data in its original context, allowing them to improve decision-making, operational efficiency, and AI-driven capabilities to provide context-aware insights for AI use cases.
SAP Enters into Agreement to Acquire WalkMe, Driving Business Transformation by Enhancing the Customer Experience and Enriching SAP Business AI Offerings
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and WalkMe Ltd. (NASDAQ: WKME) announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which SAP will acquire WalkMe, a leader in digital adoption platforms (DAPs).
WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization.
The Executive and Supervisory Boards of SAP SE and the board of directors of WalkMe have approved the transaction for US $14.00 per share in an all-cash transaction, representing an equity value of approximately US $1.5 billion. The offer price represents a 45% premium to WalkMe’s closing share price on June 4, 2024.
The envisioned combination complements SAP’s Business Transformation Management portfolio around SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers on their transformation journeys.
How Chemicals Supplier BYK Harmonized Supply Chain Planning Processes
BYK is a leading global supplier of specialty chemicals. The company’s innovative additives and differentiated solutions optimize product and material properties as well as production and application processes. Amongst other products, BYK’s high-performance additives improve scratch resistance and surface gloss, the mechanical strength or flow behavior of materials, and properties such as UV and light stability or flame retardancy. BYK also produces measuring and testing instruments that serve to effectively assess appearance and physical properties.
BYK found that the SAP Integrated Business Planning application for demand, a cloud-based application with comprehensive capabilities, could best meet its goals to harmonize demand planning processes across the organization and improve forecast accuracy. In addition, the company decided to use the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower solution, enabling the company to get real-time visibility and control over its supply chain.
SAP and NVIDIA to Accelerate Generative AI Adoption Across Enterprise Applications Powering Global Industries
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced a partnership expansion focused on accelerating enterprise customers’ ability to harness the transformative power of data and generative AI across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications.
The companies are collaborating to build and deliver SAP Business AI, including scalable, business-specific generative AI capabilities inside the Joule® copilot from SAP and across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications – all of which are underpinned by the SAP generative AI hub. The generative AI hub facilitates relevant, reliable and responsible business AI and provides instant access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs).
SNP Unlocks SAP Data for Advanced Analytics with Its Snowflake Native App
SNP Group is tackling this challenge head-on, leveraging the Snowflake Native App Framework (generally available on AWS and Azure, private preview on GCP) to create its SNP Glue Connector for SAP. Along with SNP Glue, the Snowflake Native App gives customers a simple, flexible and cost-effective solution to get data out of SAP and into Snowflake quickly and accurately.
Glue provides a simple, direct way for organizations with SAP systems to quickly and securely ingest SAP data into Snowflake. It sits on the application layer within SAP, which makes almost any structured data accessible and available for change data capture (CDC). Snowpipe Streaming allows Glue to get the data across to Snowflake very quickly.
Yokogawa Releases OpreX Carbon Footprint Tracer to Support Decarbonization in the Process Manufacturing Industries
Tracer, a solution in the OpreX™ Transformation lineup that targets the carbon footprint management needs of companies in the process manufacturing industries. OpreX Carbon Footprint Tracer is a cloud service that calculates CO2 emissions based on measurement data and other types of primary information collected from instrumentation systems, power monitors, and other systems, and a consultation service that aids in the formulation of strategies for calculating and reducing CO2 emissions. This is a total solution for the process manufacturing industries that enables the visualization and reduction of CO2 emissions.
For the calculation of CO2 emissions, this service realizes seamless integration with the SAP® Sustainability Footprint Management service and ERP solutions offered by SAP, enabling the visualization and management of product carbon footprint (PCF) based on European standards. The support for European standards and linkage with the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management service is a world first, giving companies in the process manufacturing industries the ability to both visualize and manage their PCF.
Data-driven Maintenance Work Order Management with Crosser and AVEVA
The customer faced a significant challenge with its existing automated work order management system. This system relied on monitoring maintenance metrics using PLCs alongside predefined trigger points. AVEVA System Platform was responsible for initiating SAP to trigger specific work orders aligned with predefined work plans. However, this approach demanded manual adjustments to PLCs and the AVEVA System Platform each time a new device was introduced or new parameters were required.
Moreover, when a SAP work order was completed and counters needed to be reset to zero, manual connections to the PLCs were necessary, introducing operational risks and requiring substantial manual effort with each new device or reset. The existing approach not only carried operational risks with each change but also imposed significant manual labor for every new device and reset process.
Deloitte and UiPath Expand Strategic Alliance with New SAP Delivery Framework to Accelerate Clients’ Business Transformation
Deloitte and UiPath (NYSE: PATH) today announced an alliance expansion to accelerate the transformation of their clients’ businesses through a new focus on bringing AI-powered Intelligent Automation solutions to SAP implementations and operations. The expansion will serve as a catalyst to develop an innovative AI-led delivery methodology and new solutions for autonomous business operations, accelerating their joint clients’ SAP S/4HANA® transformation goals. As a part of this expansion, UiPath and Deloitte will create a first-of-its-kind co-innovation market collaboration, combining Deloitte’s SAP implementation skillset and deep AI talent pool with UiPath’s AI and automation technology.
Accenture Expands Partnership with SAP to Help Clients Establish Responsible and Resilient Supply Chains
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) announced it will collaborate with SAP SE to help organizations reinvent their supply chains with a comprehensive supply chain nerve center that can reduce risk, enhance visibility and support sustainability goals. Additionally, Accenture and SAP plan to co-develop new capabilities for the SAP® Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution to help further enhance an organization’s ability to quickly and cost-effectively respond to changes in supply, demand and inventory.
Using cloud, data, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, the supply chain nerve centerprovides n-tier transparency, allowing organizations to identify risks beyond tier one and tier two suppliers by giving deeper visibility into their network of suppliers and subcontractors. It turns data into actionable insights and improves decision-making by sensing factors such as whether suppliers align with an organization’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals.
Automate plant maintenance using MDE with ABAP SDK for Google Cloud
Analyzing production data at scale for huge datasets is always a challenge, especially when there’s data from multiple production facilities involved with thousands of assets in production pipelines. To help solve this challenge, our Manufacturing Data Engine is designed to help manufacturers manage end-to-end shop floor business processes.
Manufacturing Data Engine (MDE) is a scalable solution that accelerates, simplifies, and enhances the ingestion, processing, contextualization, storage, and usage of manufacturing data for monitoring, analytical, and machine learning use cases. This suite of components can help manufacturers accelerate their transformation with Google Cloud’s analytics and AI capabilities.
SAP to Acquire LeanIX, Delivering Customers a Comprehensive Solution Suite for Continuous Business Transformation and a Foundation for AI-Enabled Process Optimization
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and LeanIX GmbH today announced that SAP has entered into an agreement to acquire LeanIX, a leader in enterprise architecture management (EAM) software. The planned acquisition helps SAP expand its business transformation portfolio, giving customers access to the full suite of tools required for continuous business transformation and facilitating AI-enabled process optimization. LeanIX, a privately held company, has been a strategic partner of SAP and for SAP® Signavio® solutions for 10 years. Many CIOs rely on LeanIX’s offerings as part of their digital transformation with the RISE with SAP solution.
The Supply Chain Vulnerability Scan from Cosmo Tech is now Available on the SAP® Store
Cosmo Tech announced that its Supply Chain Vulnerability Scan is now available on the SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. This AI-Simulation add-on integrates with SAP Integrated Business Planning software and delivers supply chain resilience at all levels of planning to customers.
Cosmo Tech is teaming with Accenture, its preferred global systems integrator, to bring the Supply Chain Vulnerability Scan to SAP Integrated Business Planning customers globally for improved supply chain resilience.
SAP invests directly in three AI startups: Cohere, Anthropic and Aleph Alpha
German enterprise software giant SAP is putting skin into the AI game. The company today announced it has directly invested in three AI startups: Cohere, Anthropic (maker of the Claude 2 LLM service) and Aleph Alpha.
As for why SAP chose these three gen AI startups to invest in over any others: “All three companies — Aleph Alpha (Germany), Anthropic (U.S.) and Cohere (Canada) are each recognized for industry leadership, innovation, and a unique vision for advancing AI and the potential to transform industries. And with our overarching approach to foster an open ecosystem of Business AI, we believe that SAP should give customers choice and are proud to invest in each of them.”
Redefining the consumer experience: Diageo partners with SAP and IBM on global digital transformation
Today, we are thrilled to announce an exciting collaboration between Diageo, IBM and SAP that aims to modernize Diageo’s operations on a global scale and set new benchmarks for the industry. Diageo will implement RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, streamlining their IT infrastructure and providing unified support across the 180 countries in which they operate.
IBM Consulting will bring our decades of expertise in helping consumer product organizations successfully navigate digital transformations. We are bringing together a diverse team of consultants to lead the strategy and help implement RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud across Diageo’s global business. This collaboration underscores IBM’s unwavering dedication to delivering exceptional value and driving transformative change for consumer goods companies across the globe.
SAP and Google Cloud Expand Partnership to Build the Future of Open Data and AI for Enterprises
SAP SE (NYSE SAP) and Google Cloud announced an extensive expansion of their partnership, introducing a comprehensive open data offering designed to simplify data landscapes and unleash the power of business data.
The offering enables customers to build an end-to-end data cloud that brings data from across the enterprise landscape using the SAP Datasphere solution together with Google’s data cloud, so businesses can view their entire data estates in real time and maximize value from their Google Cloud and SAP software investments.
A Deeper Look Into How SAP Datasphere Enables a Business Data Fabric
SAP announced the SAP Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio, which gives customers easy access to business-ready data across the data landscape. SAP also introduced strategic partnerships with industry-leading data and AI companies – Collibra NV, Confluent Inc., Databricks Inc. and DataRobot Inc. – to enrich SAP Datasphere and allow organizations to create a unified data architecture that securely combines SAP software data and non-SAP data.
SAP Datasphere, and its open data ecosystem, is the technology foundation that enables a business data fabric. This is a data management architecture that simplifies the delivery of an integrated, semantically rich data layer over underlying data landscapes to provide seamless and scalable access to data without duplication. It’s not a rip-and-replace model, but is intended to connect, rather than solely move, data using data and metadata. A business data fabric equips any organization to deliver meaningful data to every data consumer — with business context and logic intact. As organizations require accurate data that is quickly available and described with business-friendly terms, this approach enables data professionals to permeate the clarity that business semantics provide throughout every use case.
The Next Revolution: Industry 4.0 in the Intelligent Enterprise
Which companies benefit from being able to automatically control the entire supply chain through machines and sensors?
“Auto-control” management means saving effort in manual processes along the entire supply chain and realizing the full potential of intelligent machines and sensors. Businesses in Europe in particular are creating opportunities here – their strength is traditionally more in customer-centric manufacturing, rather than mass production. However, standard products also benefit from flexibility. The global crisis of supply and logistics poses challenges for every manufacturer. Only those who dynamically parameterize production to deploy alternative materials and processes at the push of a button will win the global race for capacity and resources.
Industry 5.0: Adding the Human Edge to Industry 4.0
So, Industry 5.0 does not so much represent yet another Industrial Revolution but rather serves to augment Industry 4.0 technologies by strengthening the collaboration between humans and robots. With Industry 5.0, the nine pillars of Industry 4.0 are expanded upon by a drive to place human creativity and well-being at the center of industry – to merge the speed and efficiency of machine technologies with the ingenuity and talent of human counterparts.
The integration of cobots and humans bring the potential to personalize and customize goods at an industrial level. As cobots execute repetitive tasks with exacting and predictable efficiency, humans can oversee the process to ensure that real-time requests for customization are understood and realized.
Getting specific – how discrete manufacturers can build greater resilience
We’ll see how Mixed Reality (MR) makes it easier for shopfloor operators to work on complex, customized products – without the lengthy, face-to-face training plus the travel this often involves. This also enables discrete manufacturers to respond to flexible product configurations with instant updating of product documentation across entire engineering and supply chains.
We’ll also look at how cloud-based Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Asset Management systems connects multiple facilities and customers vendors and all stakeholders in an ecosystem.
How Honeywell's CEO is turning the legacy manufacturer into a SaaS player
Cumulatively, it marked a significant step forward in Adamczyk’s vision to turn Honeywell from a legacy industrial manufacturer into a top software provider for sectors like real estate, life sciences and aviation.
“The one common fiber across all our businesses is we are a controls company,” he told Protocol at an event on Tuesday. “When you’re a controls company, you’re connected to everything, you’re connected to all the systems in that building, in that aircraft. We use that data to drive controls, but we could use that data to drive energy savings, to drive efficiency.”
SAP shapes the future of work with Unity
“With Unity and mixed reality, business data from SAP is no longer bound to a computer screen,” said Michael Spiess, Extended Reality Venture Lead at SAP. “Our customers can become best-run businesses by taking advantage of all mixed reality has to offer, from more effective training teams in virtual environments to driving operational efficiencies by augmenting digital twin information directly to physical equipment.”