Hello everyone,

I am Dominik Maier, Senior Vice President Products & Development and Authorized Officer at DSC Software AG. In this blog post, I would like to share with you our favorite features – top four highlights – from the biggest release of SAP Engineering Control Center.

A future-proof PLM solution capable of evolving with the requirements is essential for manufacturing companies. SAP Engineering Control Center integrates the engineering data into SAP PLM and links them to the business data. The engineering processes are optimally supported and integrated with the downstream processes. With this new release, it became even more powerful.

Now let’s take a look at the top four highlights of this release.

Enhancements for the user interface

I fondly – and by now almost nostalgically – remember the first customer contacts together with Gerhard Himmelsbach when we introduced SAP ECTR to the market. At that time, one of the first questions customers asked was whether this was really a new SAP product, since it was not a transactional view of data, but an intuitive cockpit with an alternative user interface…

Since then we have made minor adjustments to the user interface, but never fully modernized it. Now we are embracing the modernization of the user interface and user experience. Of course, without losing the good things of the past.

New user interface

This release offers a new user interface for a better user experience with the new individualization options, such as light and dark theme options or the possibility to create custom themes for an ergonomic work environment.

Previews in structures and tables

The previews can now be displayed in various product data related structures such as assemblies and bills of material for a better overview of the objects.

New process for deriving bills of material from documents

The easy handling of SAP ECTR has always been the driving factor for engineers to use it. As the complexity of the products increase, our users have enhanced requirements to derive bills of materials from the document structures. That is why we introduce the new BOM Wizard 3.0 with this release.

With the new BOM Wizard 3.0 introduced with this release, a completely new logic is implemented, which allows the users to derive BOMs for numerous use cases.

Please refer to the documentation for the complete list of usage examples:
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/PLM/BOM+Wizard+3.0

Integration of SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF

To enable a seamless experience in SAP PLM, we continue to integrate further SAP solutions.

The users can now access the SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF functions directly from SAP Engineering Control Center.

• SAP PPG structures can be displayed in the Desktop window and PSM window
• SAP PPG structures can be derived directly from document structures

Enhanced functionality of SAP EPD Collaboration

In general, it can be assumed that SAP S/4HANA (on-premise or cloud, private edition) will be used by customers to map ERP processes and ERP master data.

Cloud-native solutions are emerging or available on cloud platforms, such as BTP from SAP. These solutions enable new use cases for customers, especially when it comes to data generation, enrichment, and exchange. However, completely new business processes are also possible.

We assume that such solutions will have to be seamlessly integrated, which means that hybrid solution approaches will be used in the future. We already enable this today with SAP ECTR and we will continue to expand this.

The SAP Engineering Control Center integration to SAP EPD Collaboration to export and import documents now supports the export and import of multiple assemblies.

General Information

Check out the SAP ECTR Road Map for further planned integrations:
https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?BC=6EAE8B27FCC11ED892E9186EE86080CC&range=CURRENT-LAST#2024

This blog post provides just an overview of the latest features and enhancements of SAP Engineering Control Center. You can find the complete list of improvements and enhancements of the release here: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/PLM/What%27s+new+in+SAP+ECTR+5.2+and+SAP+ECTR+1.1+for+SAP+S4HANA#What’sNewinSAPECTR5.2andSAPECTR1.1forSAPS4HANA-5.2.6/1.1.6(July2022)

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If you are interested in more PLM relevant topics, I encourage you to read other blog posts here: https://blogs.sap.com/tags/237172457501282589953116013994631/