Introduction

Since my last product update, we made good progress in the execution of our cloud acceleration strategy in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). In this new blog post, I want to summarize the highlights of our recent Cloud PLM release with SAP Enterprise Product Development and explain why the new Intelligent Handover capability is critical for our customers to establish the digital thread. I have structured the post along our closed loop product lifecycle: Define, Develop and Deliver.

Define: Collect ideas, prioritize needs and define product requirements based on the voice of customer and market insights.

Over the years working as a Product Manager, I have learned that good ideas could come from everywhere. With idea management, crowdsourcing and voice of customer programs becoming the norm, it is more important than ever to enable Requirements Engineers and Managers to effectively manage product requirements and roadmaps. Therefore, we have introduced user experience enhancements to enable the mass maintenance of requirements.

Develop: Develop and industrialize innovative and sustainable products across the extended enterprise.

In Systems Engineering we focused on user experience improvements as well. For example, Systems Engineers can now view a block diagram in a matrix, and objects can be linked more efficiently. In addition, object constraints can now use formulas to determine specification values and verify constraint expressions. These enhancements increase the productivity of users and extend the functionality of the systems modelling tools.

Deliver: Leverage product information across the extended enterprise to support digital thread initiatives and closed loop feedback processes.

As products move from idea to market, data is created by the various teams across line of businesses. Thereby each persona has a different requirement when working with product data. To ensure that products satisfy requirements, each stakeholder in the idea to market process needs access to up to date and accurate product data. The entirety of product data is called the digital product model and in this view the Bill of Material (BoM) is a very important business object.

Today, many line of business functions use BoMs to drive their respective business processes, but the challenge we have observed is that BoM views are frequently managed in different systems. Sharing these BoMs across teams is inefficient and introduces the risk of errors if information is not properly distributed. Consider that if the product design changes, downstream teams will be using information that is no longer current.

One way to address this issue is to manage the BoM handovers in a way that keeps record of everything what happens when a new BoM view is created. Therefore we have developed a new intelligent handover capability in SAP Enterprise Product Development. I believe this capability is the most important one from a digital thread perspective.

One of the first scenarios we enabled is the transformation from an engineering BoM into a plant specific manufacturing BoM. Production engineers can use this new capability to define component allocations and the effectivities of the manufacturing BoM components, uncoupled from ongoing engineering releases. An integrated change process with conflict handling to ensure consistent manufacturing systems is one of the key value drivers of the new handover capability.

Additionally, we have ensured that the new handover capability seamlessly integrates with SAP S/4HANA through a brand-new synchronization service. In the upcoming releases we plan to extend the integration with Asset Management and enable the usage of 3D visuals in the handover process.

Additionally we have delivered following innovations in the deliver area:

• Machine learning to recognize and create hot spots in static 2D diagrams
• Use 3D models as visual context to the IoT time-series sensor data
• Visualize time-series results for functional locations

Looking for more detailed information?

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