SAP Co-Innovation Lab Highlights, April 24, 2017

April, 24, 2017. Today’s blog post only comes 3 months later than expected but writing at the start of the year would’ve meant more of a project summary for last year which at 23 active projects, kept us on our toes. Nonetheless, some of these projects have rolled right into 2017 so with 3 months into the year, now is a great time to share a glimpse into what we have going on here in the lab.

One very cool project we began last fall is with the extended supply chain team and Stellium was to from up a physical 3D model to demonstrate integration of shop floor automation with SAP ERP and Extended Warehouse Management. Manufacturing is undergoing its greatest transformation since the industrial revolution.

What we’ve set up in the COIL lab is working model of an integrated digital manufacturing prototype to demonstrate digitization, auto data capturing, auto routing and a lights-off factory concept. The digital factory setup demonstrates the networking of people, machines and data that enables clients to improve efficiency of their products in the entire value chain. We are just now entering a 2^nd project phase introducing more SAP elements like Integrated Business Planning as well as integrated robotics.

Work continues at COIL with OSISoft and all its super capability made possible from its SAP HANA IoT Integrator. The team built this connector in COIL and there are several demos available:

• Asset and Model Comparison (shows SAP HANA and Lumira integration)
• Midstream oil and gas (shorter, shows data arriving in HANA but doesn’t show it being analyzed…yet (that’s in part II))
• Asset Analysis
• Oil and Gas

Additional project work surrounds using COIL to prep for PQ Certification for V2 of the SAP HANA IoT Integrator (as a matter of fact the COIL environment for all the demos will be upgraded to V2 by SAPPHIRE).I should mention that long time COIL practitioners Critigen are collaborating with OsiSoft at COIL and will be showing how the data from PI can be used in a geospatial demo and associated work management using the COIL environment.

If you are at the event this year and want to learn more about what OSISoft or Critigen is up to at COIL, both will exhibit this year. We are thrilled to see so much activity surrounding this team in the lab and the high potential for intersects to other partners and projects at COIL. As we enable more IoT-focused projects we see an opportunity to provide projects access to an OSISoft PI server including the ability to stream data coming into COIL from solar panels on the roof of the building, our coil computing center HVAC system and smart LED lighting.

As we pursue this project, it invariably brings up many discussions about cognitive computing and machine learning. It’s interesting to note how often we encounter some degree of misunderstanding of these terms and how they relate. I intend to co-author an upcoming post with Enterra CEO and Founder Stephen DeAngelis to explore these terms within the context of the project work we are doing today.

Also worth mentioning is that KORE continues to build out its SAP Bots at COIL and are crafting use cases including SCP, SuccessFactors, C4C and Hybris. They will also be exhibiting at SapphireNow 2017. KORE continues to acknowledge a lot of traction for what it brings to the market with this most recent bit of news keeping everyone amped on Enterprise Bots-

I wish to also mention that we continue to see good progress with the project work we are doing with Enterra Solutions where we are exploring how we can pull in some select customer master data that can be acted upon by the Enterra ECS cognitive computing engine and then directed into the SAP IBP Control Tower. The team was held up with some of its task work including formation of a workaround for consuming alerts through the odata service. The team tried the functionality by calling the odata service from a 3^rd party tool like Postman and SAP HCI-DS. Both are working. The next steps are to create a data flow integration between IBP and the COIL landscape (drop csv files in a specific directory so that cognitive computing solution can further process it).

Long time Denizens of COIL, SAP NS2 continue to evolve the HANA Intelligent Data Fusion solution. The HANA Intelligent Data Fusion (IDF) capability is an internal NS2 POC that is used as a demonstrable model for the “art of the possible” for complex, large scale “Big Data” analytics projects within the US Intelligence and DoD Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) communities.

The HANA IDF Platform is based on the premise of a closed loop data-to-information process to create knowledge domains where information can be explored and discovered using a variety of tools and techniques.

I am looking forward to covering the various dimensions of the HANA IDF in breakout session planned for Big Data Day being hosted here at COIL on Tues. April 25^th, 2017. I’m going to only have time to provide the analytics perspective of the platform but will circle back in a future blog to talk about all the cool machine learning and cyber security dimensions that also underscore the HANA Intelligent Data Fusion platform.

Future 2017 Projects-

We’ve got a rich pipeline of project proposals and projects just now forming up. We look for Intel, Dell, HDS, vmware, NetApp, Citrix, Pure Storage and RedHat to all be active in the lab over the next several weeks and with the continued rollout of all things SAP Leonardo, there is fertile ground to enable many additional IoT-based projects for partners and customers to explore the SAP Cloud Platform and emerging new IoT-based solutions in areas like augmented reality, drones, additive manufacturing and robotics.