SAP demonstrates IoT-powered Digital Service for Industrial Machinery

At Hannover Messe, the world’s biggest industrial fair, SAP demonstrated the next generation Digital Customer Service solution for manufacturers of complex assets. We hosted many visitors from the industrial machinery industry at the SAP booth.

This Digital Customer Service solution addresses the main driving factors in Aftermarket Service:

• Customer centricity – with a great service experience as one of the key elements
• Service is the new marketing – identifying cross- and up-sell opportunities
• Service excellence – do more with less and improve service efficiency
• New service business models – like Equipment-as-a-Service

In our integrated end-to-end showcase, we demonstrated a solution that helps industrial machinery companies drive their service to the next level to outperform the competition. We connected a Mitsubishi robot, equipped with a gripper hand from Schunk, to show an integrated flow from the physical asset through IoT-based service to service execution.

The solution consists of these elements:

Customer Service Portal

• Asset-related collaboration based on the asset’s digital twin
• Customer self-service support
• Spare parts shop and integrated 3D printing for spare parts provisioning

IoT-Powered Service

• Remote condition monitoring of the connected robot
• Visualization of the robot’s current and future condition
• Predictive maintenance, identifying issues even before they occur

Service Excellence in Service Execution

• Support the service agent through recommendations based on machine learning
• Integrated mobile field service app for service technicians – fully offline-enabled
• An augmented reality app, helping the technician to identify and resolve the issue on site

New business models

• Equipment-as-a-Service as an alternative to selling products, fully supported by the SAP solution
• Consumption- and performance-based billing, based on data transferred from the asset via IoT

Marketing

• Target group generation based on asset usage data provided through IoT
• Insights into asset usage behavior help identify cross- and up-sell opportunities for services and parts

The showcase demonstrated that the combination of SAP Leonardo and SAP Hybris solutions, based on SAP S/4HANA, is a unique and unbeatable portfolio for industrial machinery companies who intend to take their customer service to the next level.

You may also watch this nice video.

If you want to learn more about next generation Digital Service, feel free to contact me.

Ulf Guttmann is a Solution Manager in the global SAP Industry Business Unit for the Industrial Machinery and Components industry, which is responsible for SAP’s industry solution portfolio. Ulf is an expert for Aftermarket Service and Internet of Things. In his more than 25-year software industry career he worked in consulting, education, product management and sales. In the last more than 20 years he has been dealing with SAP’s solutions for Aftermarket Service.