"Product Data eXchange is focused on the problem of communicating product definition information between Original Equipment Manufacturers, Service providers and component suppliers."
Introduction
Data exchange is the process of taking data structured from a source system and transforming it into data structured for a target system, so that the target data is an accurate representation of the source data. Transfer of data is necessary so that, for example, one organization can be developing product design, while another performs analysis work on the same design; at the same time a third organization is responsible for manufacturing the desired product.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud for intelligent product design provides a simple yet powerful and flexible way to describe product content (Bill of Materials (BOM), Materials, Drawings, etc.), Engineering Change Requests (ECR), Engineering Change Orders (ECO) and Document Info Records (DIR) in a standardized way. (See Enabling Product Data Collaboration on BOMs) Accelerate product innovation with efficiency improvements throughout the supply chain as partners have a way to exchange product content and changes on a common platform.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud for intelligent product design
SAP S/4 HANA Cloud for Intelligent Product Design accelerates product innovation with instant collaboration allowing business partners to exchange product data across the extended enterprise.
- With its unique integration to SAP S/4HANA digital core, IPD Collaboration gives R&D teams the flexibility and visibility to collaborate across the extended supply network.
- Invite suppliers and partners into your collaborations, publish BOMs and other structured data into the Collaboration application.
- Drive workflow-based review and change management in Collaboration application for changes proposed by Collaboration participants and synchronize back the results while keeping the R&D back-end consistent.
- IPD Collaboration can serve as a solution realizing product data exchange scenarios for manufacturing companies and their partners.
Product Data Pipeline
The below diagram explains the overall architecture of structured data collaboration capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for intelligent product design.
IPD provides not only consistent user interfaces and high performance data acquisition, but also modern data structures and data formats therefore is a platform for high accuracy in the data exchange process and robust and extensible exchange mechanisms.
Data acquisition
Product data objects can be imported from system of record via modern interface capable of describing object metadata and structures. IPD connects to OData interfaces enriched with SAP annotations
Transformation
Collaboration parties can propose changes on the data objects imported in the staging are of a collaboration. IPD user interfaces allow participants to view and manage redlinings in a consistent user interface.
Constraints
The flexible workflow allows organizations to define company specific product data lifecycle. Organizations can model process steps required to cleanse, authorize and publish product data back to system of records by modelling a series of gateways, user and service tasks.
Conclusion
The below blogs describe the implementation details of modeling such a Product Data eXchange -
- Introduction to Annotations & Vocabularies
- Introduction to Annotation Tags and Properties
- Enabling Product Data Collaboration on BOMs
- Annotation’s usage in S4/HANA Intelligent product design
References
- SAP Managed Tags:
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