From a software perspective, the core of a company used to be Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP for short. Today, in the age of digital transformation, this still applies - but the ERP basis must have changed just as radically as the rest of the company in terms of transformation. Today, ERP is the ordering system that - closely interwoven with an orchestrating system - establishes the connection to executing systems such as robots, production machines and their sensors. Humans only interact with these systems at the really critical touchpoints - when basic specifications are required or problems arise.

The factory floor is the traditional core of a company, where chips fly and products are screwed, glued, soldered or perhaps even "printed" from metal dust. Now it is finally being connected to IT and the business logic carried out there. The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining ground as soon as the machines are equipped with sensors and can provide feedback. The principle of "Connect Digitally to Perfect Reality" is turning IT into the production manager - and the vision of this as artificial intelligence is rapidly approaching. In the future, such systems will talk to people and machines, which is why the software stack in the factory is currently undergoing a complete overhaul.

Ultimately, the driver of this development is changing consumer behavior, which is reflected in the supply chains of the various industries. Customer experience is one of the current buzzwords, or in the words of Steve Jobs: "You have to start with the customer experience and then work your way back to the technology you need - not the other way around." [1] Absolute quality and reliability, customer orientation through ever more precise fulfilment of needs, and the resulting individualization of products, are the parameters for successful companies. But companies need to think further: it's not just about optimizing production or manufacturing precisely tailored products. Digital transformation is creating platforms for a supply chain within an industry that inevitably offer advantages for those who provide the platform. Added to this is the evaluation of user data and the resulting new product-related services. A brief comparison with the automotive industry: after the increasing possibility of variation when ordering a car - which could lead to a batch of 1, but will not necessarily happen that way - the evaluation of user behavior in the car will soon open up the possibility of further value creation for OEMs (if others don't do it). One example would be an app that gives a sports car a different set-up for propulsion and suspension for a weekend rally over the Alps than for driving through the city.

What is also clear is that many companies have only just embarked on the path to transformation. And there is still a lot of work to be done on digitalization and standardization. This is why a number of companies have launched an innovation initiative for the Open Integrated Factory. Beckhoff, Kuka, Asentics, Cab, Mettler Toledo, Atlas Copco, Proglove, Formlabs, Evoguard, Serva, Fujitsu and SAP are working together here.

The Open Integrated Factory

The Open Integrated Factory Showcase 2018 was recently on display at SPS IPC Drives in Nuremberg, demonstrating how far Industry 4.0 has already come. In the showcase, partners MHP, Serva and SAP demonstrated highly dynamic and flexible order processing with modular assembly. Devices on the shop floor - at the "edge", as the IT experts say - communicate live with autonomous transport robots, for example, and thus connect the bits from production planning with real production. The transport robots are controlled by autonomous agents and select the workstations that are currently free, for example. The showcase is based on SAP Digital Manufacturing. For example, the process surrounding a pressure valve was shown on this platform. The customer configures it individually via the web and triggers production. After production, the quality is automatically checked with cameras, the valve is laser-ducked and automatically picked, right through to the creation of the digital twin, which is effectively the product's "birth certificate". Thanks to the digital twin, the system already knows everything that has occurred during the manufacture of the product.

What makes an open, integrated factory

The data is exchanged via the OPC UA open protocol. The "Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture" is a collection of standards for communication and data exchange in the field of industrial automation. OPC UA is used to describe the transport of machine-to-machine data as well as interfaces and the semantics of data. The latter is an important basis for the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Today, any company can easily embark on the digital transformation. It is best to start a pilot project with a product range and pick up the thread. The open factory of the future has three characteristics:

• A software architecture designed for the cloud. Even if the digital factory and its IT remain within a company's campus, it needs modern IT platforms. This starts with a containerized, service-oriented IT architecture and ends with database cores that are fast enough for IoT and cloud-capable, such as the SAP S/4HANA business suite as the core and the SAP Cloud Platform based on it.
• A connection between the virtual world of data (in the cloud) and the real, physical world of things. This connection between the digital and the real world also results in the use of digital twins, because every object in the real world, for example a turning/milling machine or a car, should have a corresponding counterpart in the virtual world of the cloud.
• Bandwidth and future-proof standards. The Internet of Things triggers an enormous flow of data that requires very fast processing - i.e. directly in real time or very close to real time. This requires high bandwidths and, in addition, edge computing, which pre-filters data directly at the sensor, at the machine, before it reaches the cloud. In addition, the standards used must be future-proof and have semantic formats that allow the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Many machine manufacturers have already embarked on the path to the future. According to a study by Deloitte, the proportion of IoT projects in manufacturing is now 77% [2]. In its study, Deloitte confirms SAP's pioneering role thanks to the fast ERP kernel SAP 4/HANA. More than 70 special applications are already based on the open, cloud-capable SAP HANA platform. SAP Leonardo, SAP's central system for IoT applications, is paving the way for the integrated factory. The products from the Leonardo portfolio can be used to organize and control a wide range of business and production processes and to implement the "Open Integrated Factory" together with other partners.

Nils Herzberg, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Discrete Industries at SAP / ag

Literature:

1. http://www.marke41.de/content/die-customer-experience-challenge
2. https://www2.deloitte.com/de/de/pages/operations/articles/manufacturing-4-0-meilenstein-must-have-oder-millionengrab.html