Business case for PPDS ... View more

"Modification bracket structure is inconsistent" we are facing this issue, kindly tell me what to do to solve this ? ... View more

Hi, First of all this is process based industry. Step 1: 1. We have created one production order with total quantity of 10 kg. 2. Unit of measurement for the FG is ‘KG’ 3. Goods issue for the component materials are also done. ( You can check in ‘ Display production order’ ) 4. Now we are doing MIGO tile for Goods Receipt against order. Process order number: 1000033 Our Requirement: 1. In ‘MIGO’ Tile, we have given input in ‘No’of Container’ field as ‘2’ 2. Second thing is ‘ It is maintained as Batch material. 3. Based on the ‘Quantity’ that we are entering in MIGO for goods receipt against order and we are giving input in ‘No.of container’ field, the quantity and batch has to be auto generate in Distribute quantity tab. ( Note: It has to generate different batches not same batch ) 4. For example: a) Quantity: 10 Kg b) No. of containers: 2 c) Batch split: 5 quantity in Batch A & 5 quantity in Batch B need to generate automatically. ... View more

team As understood from std documentation a slot is represented by a network. Is there a mechanism to use slots without network for things like daily checks and defects correction in a repair location. ... View more

We all love to look up and get inspired by the universe.  Last week’s successful Artemis 1 mission heralds a new era of innovation in which NASA will once again begin Moon exploration, using new innovative technologies to explore the lunar surface and build a basecamp. It takes a vast array of international organizations, collaboration across scientific, commercial, and partners carefully orchestrated design, production, launch, and management of the mission bringing together brand-new thoughts, products, and processes to make a launch that is successful   Innovation acceleration for the good of mankind Innovations originating from space exploration span communication, medicine, and transportation to the everyday. A great summary of a small sample of interesting innovations is detailed in the  Inc. magazine article from Bill Murphy Jr.   Innovation and beyond One example of an innovation that was developed as part of the Space programs is advanced water filtration. The same technology that was used in Apollo is now used to clean water in remote villages. This is described in the NASA Spin off article from 2004 The impact of water filtration on global health and sustainability is huge, and being able to use this spin-off technology is helping people all over the world Let’s think about how it helps so much beyond the immediate health. Fewer water-based sicknesses – reducing sickness and mortality providing for a healthy community. Less need for expensive hospital and medicine resources and their distribution by reducing sickness at its source Reduced pollution from transportation to move centrally filtered water to remote regions When we apply technology developed for Space to other industries, we see how much this innovation has impacted the world.   Artemis – Technology Developments  Once again, partners of the NASA space program are innovating, finding new ways to solve challenges from design to launch and beyond. One example is SAP customer Solvay, a science company whose technologies bring benefits to many aspects of daily life. With more than 21,000 employees in 63 countries. Solvay is a high-performance composite and polymer materials and solutions provider that has been a key partner for Space exploration for over 50 years.  Solvay supplied Northrop Grumman with its high-temperature ablative materials for use in Artemis’ solid rocket motor (SRM) nozzles offering enhanced insulation properties and thermal performance. As hot gases exit the rocket motor, ablative materials char, creating an additional thermal insulation layer protecting the nozzle structure. In addition, Solvay's glass phenolic structural overwrap material is used to provide strength to the nozzle.   Technology for a sustainable planet Carmelo Lo Faro President, Solvay Materials Segment, a recent appointee to the ExCom of the Aerospace Industry Association, said recently of the game-changing innovations coming from Artemis and space exploration “ Artemis follows a long tradition of bringing science, engineering, and creativity together to push the limits of what mankind believes is possible. At Solvay, we are innovating to make missions such as Artemis possible but also to find solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges by generating scientific breakthroughs that protect our heritage for generations to come”.   Innovation Acceleration is a process Innovation acceleration is a scientific process requiring a framework from design thinking to technology application. Software, along with people and capital work together to orchestrate the design, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, delivery, and service of equipment for a sustainable product lifecycle. SAP is happy to be one of the core components bringing together technology for NASA And ESA Artemis partners. New systems of integration accelerate the design to the manufacturing process and build from the continuous learning from IoT sensors to constantly improve and push boundaries   It takes a village  To sum it all up, I believe a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In space, there are no product return policies.  Everything must work the first time, every time. To accelerate launches or reduce the technical impact of a launch, companies must collaborate and simulate.  Bringing innovation together across global partners and organizations requires an orchestration across the entire supply chain to achieve the unthinkable in Aerospace exploration.   The Future is ours NASA and ESA Innovation is our competitive edge building upon the community of industrial, international, and academic partnerships forged for the space station. Commercial companies will play an increasing role in the space industry: launching rockets and satellites, transporting cargo and crew, building infrastructure space fostering opportunities to turn new knowledge into things that improve life here on Earth. Learn more about NASA , Solvay,  SAP Aerospace innovation programs here ... View more

Looking for some feedback on how similar cases have been handled. We have a machining cell that consists of 3 individual machines that all do unique processes. To keep it simple - let's assume each of the 3 operations take 5 min. The first serial number to pass through the cell will spend 5 min per operation and be within this machining cell for 15 min total. Is the best practice for routings then 15 min per part? Or does it consider that this machining cell actually outputs 12 parts per hour once fully primed which would imply a 5 minute cycle time? We do not split out the individual operations for this "process" as we have multiple machining cells and some perform the operation in 1 step, some in 2 steps, and some in 3 steps. When we launch a work order we don't know which machining line the part will go through at that time either. Thanks for any input. ... View more

Introduction This article will give you an understanding of the two main options that allow you to make enhancements to the PMMO application. Option 1 - Flexible Enhancements via Subclasses has been nicely described already. Option 2 - Enhance PMMO classes by using Events will be described in detail here. Note: Option 2 requires the use of option 1 but in contrast to option 1 you are not bypassing any SAP delivered coding. This might save you some headaches during an upgrade or support package installation. Use of Events in PMMO With the on premise 2022 release (Release To Customer on 10/12/2022) the development team has introduced more than 30 ABAP OO events that can be used by customers and/or partners to influence the behavior of the PMMO application. This new enhancement approach was integrated into the PMMO implementation guide (transaction PMMO_IMG): PMMO IMG The IMG node was also down ported to the 2021 release via note 3198543 but there you will not find  many events. Executing the IMG activity will lead you to this screen: In the list output you can see the PMMO classes and the public events that the classes publish. On the right hand side you see an icon, indicating that documentation for the event exists. If you click on the documentation link, you will see a screen like this: As the documentation indicates, we deliver a sample class CL_PMMO_PEG_UTIL_CUST_ENH_EX to show you how to use the delivered events. Let's take this example and start from scratch to see how we get to this point. Edit Pegging Records in PMMO 2022 We are running transaction PMMO_PEGGING to display the current assignments in the database. We select a lot of records and then click the 'Change Assignments' button. The system has limited the number of records that can be edited to 100. Now we want to implement the event handler that allows us to increase this limit to 250. Implement an Event Handler For that we go back to our IMG listing of the available events (the shortcut to get there is transaction PMMO_DISPLAY_EVENTS) : Click the hotspot on the SAP delivered class: CL_PMMO_PEGGING_UTILITIES: Select the GUI option 'Create subclass': Create the class in your own namespace. Make sure that the instance generation is set to 'Public'. Next, create a CONSTRUCTOR method for the class: We'll come back to the constructor in a minute but first we have to create an event handler method for the event we want to process: The typical naming convention for an event handler method is ON_name_of_the_event. Once you have entered the method name, click on the detail button highlighted above. The method has to be marked as an event handler method for the class/event that we want to process. When this is complete, switch to the Parameters of the method: Click on the button 'Event Parameters' to copy the parameters into your event handler method: The parameter has been copied to the method. In the method itself, we change the number of records that can be processed: Since the event parameter is a reference, we can address it via the '->*' selector. Now the method is ready for use. It's time to go back to the constructor method and register the method we just created for the actual event handling: You have to call the super constructor first before you can use the SET HANDLER command. Everything is ready now from a coding perspective. The last step we need to complete is the registration of the class in the PMMO subclass manager. Register Class in Subclass Manager Go to the PMMO IMG and choose the option 'Replace SAP PMMO Classes with Customer Classes'. Execute the activity and select the button 'New Entries': You can choose to run the code only for your user ID or for all users (in this case leave the User ID field empty). In a production client the code can not be run for an individual user. The User ID field must be empty. In the Class field you enter the standard PMMO class you want to enhance. Use the F4 help on the Subclass field to select your class. As you can see the standard delivered class CL_PMMO_PEG_UTIL_CUST_ENH_EX is also shown, since it inherits from CL_PMMO_PEGGING_UTILITIES as well. Activate the entry to complete the setup. Test the Enhancement Run Pegging Display again: Select a lot of records and try to change them: Now we get an error message that reflects the changes we made: We have successfully implemented an enhancement via PMMO events! Other Events The previous example is a simple event with one parameter. Most events have multiple parameters and many offer a parameter ER_DO_NOT_EXECUTE, as in the following example: If you set this parameter ER_DO_NOT_EXECUTE->* = ABAP_TRUE in your event handler method then the system will skip the processing of further code in the standard implementation. Need for Additional Events We are aware that the events we deliver will not cover all the scenarios were you would like to add/change functionality in the PMMO application. If you have a need or suggestion for additional events, please send us a customer message on component LO-PMM and explain your scenario to us. We would be happy to provide additional events as needed. Multi Level Inheritance Does this concept support multi-level inheritance and how does it work? Yes, it does and we will look at how it works now. You might need this if you work with one of our partners and they deliver add-on functionality to PMMO via their classes. Let's assume that partner A delivers a class to you that implements an event handler for the event CHECK_IN_STK_INDICTR of class CL_PMMO_UTILITIES. You also want to enhance the standard SAP class. Here is the class that the partner delivers: It is important that the partner class is not marked as final: Now you can create a class that inherits from the partner class: Attributes of your class: This class can be final, unless you want/need additional subclasses. This is what the inheritance hierarchy looks like: In the subclass manager you have the following entry: In the Subclass field you specify the class with the lowest level in the inheritance hierarchy that you want to process. Because of the inheritance the partner class as well as the customer class will be processed. Note that the F4 help shows all classes that inherit from CL_PMMO_PEGGING_UTILITIES, even though they might not directly inherit from it. This display feature is only available starting with the PMMO 2022 release . In the 2021 release the ZCL_PMMO_PEGGING_UTILITIES class would not show in the F4 help but you can still enter it in the Subclass field and the inheritance functionality will work just fine. Another nice feature available starting with the 2022 release is the inheritance display in the subclass compare function: After you click the 'Compare' button, you will see this: The system has recognized that we have an inheritance chain active and displays that in the list. Click the hotspot 'Multi Level Inheritance Hierarchy' and you will see this: Local Classes in Reports The final piece in the PMMO enhancement puzzle are local classes in reports. This was either done because there didn't seem to be a need for a global class or because of a tight integration of the class and the screen/view cluster functionality, e.g. for the change pegging transaction. These local classes still support the subclass enhancement concept but the implementation is slightly different. With transaction PMMO_CSUBCL you can see the global and local classes that support our enhancement concept: Let's take class LCL_RTM_DISPLAY in report RPMMO_DISPLAY_RTM as an example: You can see that most of the methods in the local class have to do with the ALV functionality to display the data. Note the statement INCLUDE ZRPMMO_DISPLAY_RTM IF FOUND. Each report with local classes will have one or more INCLUDE report_name IF FOUND statements. This is intended for you to enhance the local class, if so desired. The includes are in customer namespace and do not exist in the SAP standard delivery. Double click on the Z include name to create the object: In the new include we can define the subclass and the functionality we want to implement: Here we are just making a field visible that was set to TECH in the standard delivery. When we are done with the enhancement in the report, we still need to register the new subclass in the subclass manager: Note that now the fields Class and Program are filled. This is done automatically if you use the F4 help on the Class field and pick the appropriate local class/program combination. The F4 help for local subclasses is only available starting with the PMMO 2022 release. In the 2021 release you will get a message that an F4 for local subclasses is not available but you can just copy and paste the local class name from the report. Make sure to set the entry to Active. Now you have also implemented a subclass enhancement for a local report. At this time we do not have events available in the local classes but if one is needed, please let us know. Syntax Errors in Subclasses. The runtime measurement macros that are built into the pegging and distribution code can cause syntax errors in subclasses. See note 3105376 for an explanation and solution. Summary I hope that you now have a good understanding of the enhancement concept in the PMMO application. The use of events is preferable and less disruptive then overriding methods delivered in the standard solution. It is the way we would recommend for you to enhance the PMMO solution. Good luck with your implementation and we are looking forward to your feedback.     ... View more

SAP and Siemens have recently announced a strategic partnership largely in recognition that both companies are philosophically aligned around the concept of leveraging a true “digital thread” to provide previously unachievable levels of innovation, efficiency, and accelerated industrial transformation to our joint customers. It’s been the dream of every manufacturer, product design team, and service lifecycle manager to have a single digital thread that integrates all the real-time information, feedback, performance, and data on a product from cradle to grave. The vision is that every downstream team will have in-the-moment access to what every other group is doing. Processes will go from reactive to predictive. SAP and Siemens have been pursuing a version of this vision independently up to now, and now we have aligned forces in the engineering and asset management domains, and our customers are understandably excited about the possibilities. However, at this point in time, SAP and Siemens have agreed to continue to provide customers a choice in the manufacturing domain (i.e., we do not have a joint, aligned strategy), and the two companies will consequently provide two different perspectives here. As a result of having different strategies and perspectives for data flows and solution architectures for manufacturing, each company will provide two different sets of attainable value, and it’s up to each of our customers to decide which value set is most important to them. From SAP’s perspective, it is essential that manufacturing execution be as close as possible to supply chain business processes - planning, procurement, warehouse/inventory management, logistics - and embedded with other core ERP functions such as finance, project systems, and quality management. If you're an A&D company, your corporate Executive Leadership Team describes in detail in its Annual Report the risks to company profitability, and they usually include such things as a preponderance of fixed price contracts and performance penalties, compliance with government defense accounting regulations, environmental compliance, quality issues, supplier performance, material availability, inaccurate cost estimates, cyber threats, improper cost allocations, and adverse findings from DCAA/DCMA audits.  Most A&D companies today largely mitigate these risks with the help of technology enablement from SAP, and it is therefore imperative from a business risk and profitability perspective to maintain a seamless and transparent flow of process and data  between manufacturing and the business in your production programs. The Siemens-SAP agreement will only strengthen our existing capability of establishing and maintaining collaborative connectivity between design engineering data in PLM with core planning and production business processes in SAP. The SAP/Siemens partnership in engineering and at the junction of engineering and manufacturing is great news for our joint customers. With a jointly defined and supported interface between Siemens Teamcenter PLM core and SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing, companies can confidently rely on a streamlined, bidirectional flow of process and data between the applications. And when it comes to driving business processes and insights from manufacturing machine and shop floor data, SAP feels like we have the most robust and value-driven approach to Industry 4.0 and industrial IOT. I will use the rest of this blog to address some select topics that your company may be considering as it evaluates available options. Concurrent Engineering With Siemens bringing its world-class Teamcenter PLM application and SAP bringing its world-class S/4HANA Manufacturing system to the partnership, joint customers now rightly have high expectations on new levels of technology enablement for some of the core principals held dear by aerospace and defense manufacturers such as Concurrent Engineering. SAP absolutely believes in the concept of concurrent engineering as a key enabler of meeting customer requirements to cost and schedule targets and looks to extend it beyond where many PLM systems can go.  The Defense Acquisition University defines concurrent engineering as, “A systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. Intended to cause developers, from the beginning, to consider all elements of the system life cycle from requirements development through disposal, including cost, schedule, and performance.” After the “organizing genius” of the  famed Skunk Works’ Kelly Johnson proved that advanced aircraft could be designed and built in record time during the 1960’s by co-locating different specialists of engineering and manufacturing in the same factory, many of these same concepts have been extended in the disciplines of what we know today as Systems Engineering, Integrated Product Teams and Digital Twin. Concurrent Engineering is also known as “Design for X” or “Design for the ‘ilities”. The “‘ilities” are program specific, but typically include Design for Manufacturability, Assembly, Affordability, Reliability, Quality, Serviceability, Environmental Compliance, and others. Clearly, designing for these considerations cannot be met with a “throw it over the wall” mentality, and leading manufacturers are now using enabling technology, like software applications from SAP and Siemens, to foster collaborative, concurrent processes akin to what Kelly Johnson used to have in his small, self-contained Skunk Works but nowadays in much larger, geographically dispersed teams in a new form of virtual co-location. With our integration, SAP can now help companies complete the Concurrent Engineering vision by bringing Program Management, Supply Chain Management, Purchasing, Quality Management, Aftermarket Sustainment, Finance and Accounting into the picture to ensure that products and their defining processes are truly optimized from an enterprise perspective for cost, quality and schedule. From SAP’s perspective, many aspects of Design for Manufacturability have been addressed well by the current generation of CAD/CAM systems, with 3D model-based definition having embedded geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, manufacturing machine programming instructions, etc. Our aim is to accelerate decision making, optimize productivity and improve quality by integrating the 3D visualization and product manufacturing information (PMI) from these models with the business data across the value chain. In addition, it allows the manufacturer to optimize their business operations simultaneously across multiple programs and sectors for new levels of enterprise profitability and shareholder value. Comprehensive change impact analysis and quality assurance cannot be achieved unless MES is embedded with Supply Chain and Finance. As PMI is shared and manufacturing process instructions are defined inside of an SAP system, information can be tracked and shared down to the individual manufacturing station, even taking CAM programs generated in CAD/CAM systems (sometimes automatically generated on the 3D models) along with the routings that would be applied at the plant level. Combined with the 3D data-rich product model in SAP, the bi-directional collaboration enabled by the SAP Team Data Management Integration enables a truly enterprise engineering change process. Change Impact Analysis in the SAP Manufacturing system can now identify all engineering bills of material, manufacturing bills of material, planning bills of material, routings, production orders, and purchase orders impacted by engineering changes, which allows orchestration of change between individuals and departments using workflow. This understanding of the variables that can impact actual manufacturing of a product, including the potential need to shift manufacturing not only to a new machine in a plant, but potentially to a new facility with different capabilities and options, where a Plant BOM needs to be derived that is unique to that plant and where appropriate routings for that plant need to be applied and supported, is key to providing a truly supported concurrent engineering platform.  Because the linkage between product definition and all the business information in the business system (ERP) is accessible to all the upstream and downstream operations, the business can now maximize profits through improved efficiencies and improved decision making throughout. Exposure of this digital thread information to the right users at the right time is realized through the growing capabilities available for visual representations.  The SAP Visual Enterprise toolset recognizes that people are visual by nature.  SAP VE allows users both inside of engineering and throughout an organization to view and query the design with 3D viewing tools in their everyday workspaces on the devices of their choosing.  Like other tools on the market, this includes the ability to drive animations of parts and assemblies to visually communicate manufacturing or assembly work instructions to include in the digital thread for use on the shop floor or in the field. However, SAP has gone way beyond traditional viewing tools by pervasively embedding 3D product visualization throughout the SAP application portfolio. SAP now enables a visual digital thread that empowers people with 2D, 3D and geo-enabled visualizations integrated throughout the enterprise with insights to improve key business decisions across the full product lifecycle. We can connect 2D & 3D CAD data with ERP and master data from design, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, quality, asset operations and service to deliver a Model Based Enterprise. The 3D model is now a 3D visual index to enterprise data and analytics, providing access and visibility to reduce time for all stakeholders to make key business decisions. The unlocking of business data into this visual world, based on a common digital thread is unique to SAP and critical to making true Concurrent Engineering a reality. Factory Simulation There are many tools on the market for simulating factory layouts and production processes in 3D, and Siemens Technomatix and Dassault Systemes Delmia are prominent players. SAP does not have a similar tool set, and we co-exist with whatever simulation tools our customers are using. We consider these types of applications for factory design to be analogous to CAD tools for product design. They do not play a role in day-to-day development of MBOM, bill of process, routings, work instructions, etc. They are niche tools that are primarily deployed when setting up a new factory or new manufacturing process. We applaud their usage in these scenarios, but they should not impact a company’s strategy for a manufacturing engineering or production operations solution. ISA-95 interpretation The ISA-95 standard is developed with the objective to reduce the cost, risk and errors associated with implementing interfaces between enterprise and production control systems. Where such interfaces are required by our customers, the SAP Digital Manufacturing Suite fully supports the ISA-95 standard (SAP colleagues were founding members and authors of the standard). The standard does not dictate solution architectures or specify that IT systems much be modularized by “levels”. By providing a fully integrated shop-floor to top-floor solution stack, SAP has essentially minimized the need for our customers to worry about using the standard’s interoperability specifications, some of which can be quite heavyweight. On the other hand, we provide all the XSD schemas, and B2MML structures are fully supported. Any structure you can conceive in B2MML (standard or custom) is possible to generate and manage inside the SAP Digital Manufacturing Suite. And SAP also provides several additional powerful and flexible methods for integrating enterprise and production control systems, which is why you will find SAP as a common core in most industrial manufacturing architectures. Although the standard is useful for its core objective, we also see the manufacturing industry changing fast with the advent of Industry 4.0 IOT and other intelligent technologies. The standard, initially developed two decades ago, needs to be reconsidered and expanded into the Industry 4.0 landscape and journey.  In SAP’s White Paper titled “SAP’s Strategy for Industry 4.0” we outline the challenges and the associated transformation that companies will have to pursue in order to meet the future demands on their manufacturing systems driven by customer needs.  This transformation includes the implementation of systems that follow the evolution of the traditional ISA-95 stack to a digital production platform that adheres the ISA-95 standard across all layers of the manufacturing systems pyramid.  For details please refer to section “Evolution of Production Software Stack” on page 13 of the white paper. SAP is aware that there are those who believe in a modularized manufacturing application stack comprising separate applications broken out more or less according to the levels used in ISA-95 to define interoperability standards. SAP does not agree that there is any architecture specification dictated by ISA-95 nor that there is a need to necessarily separate applications if the architecture is properly designed and use cases are properly accounted for. In fact, a defense contractor could potentially create significant legal and financial liabilities by taking something as core as materials management and planning out of the core business system. SAP software may be an integral part of your company’s ability to not only operate its supply chain, manufacturing, sustainment and financial systems in the most efficient manner, but it also provides the capability to do so while addressing the Materials Management Accounting System (MMAS) compliance requirements inherent in US federal contracting. SAP strongly recommends a thorough review of DFARS Subpart 242.72 CONTRACTOR MATERIAL MANAGEMENT AND ACCOUNTING SYSTEM and Clause 252.242-7004 MATERIAL MANAGEMENT AND ACCOUNTING SYSTEM to avoid risks while considering new solution architectures. In the event there are any residual concerns on how the SAP Digital Manufacturing Suite deals with architecture-related issues such as latency, availability and cybersecurity, we will address those in turn. Latency and Availability Questions around latency and availability are interlinked and are fully addressed by SAP. SAP and the large ecosystem of SAP partners have successfully addressed these issues for thousands of large manufacturing companies for many years. The SAP Digital Manufacturing Suite provides solutions that are available fully on premise in your data center, on premise at the edge in your factory, in the cloud, or in a hybrid combination. For example, SAP’s solution for production engineering and complex assembly operations (SAP PEO) is typically run from a centralized server because these functions do not require millisecond processing response time. On the other hand, highly automated and machine connected manufacturing execution is typically managed with SAP ME/MII, which can be run in a remote data center or “at the edge” to service the manufacturing operations if latency and availability requirements are stringent. The ultimate solution selection will depend on a company’s requirements around latency and availability, which is mostly driven by the performance of the underlying IT infrastructure (i.e., the infrastructure can be designed to spec). In general, there are 3 aspects that need to be considered: Integration between automation systems (PLC’s, CNC, robots, IoT devices …) to the MES system ERP system availability MES System availability   Integration between automation systems (PLC’s, CNC, robots …) and the MES system: Integration between SAP Digital Manufacturing Suite solutions and automation devices will be orchestrated through SAP Plant Connectivity (PCo, a runtime component of SAP MII). For all manufacturing solutions we recommend implementing the device connector (SAP PCo) on the manufacturing floor network, often installed on the same server as the OPC-UA server, to eliminate latency issues or unnecessary network traffic outside of the manufacturing network.  SAP ME can be installed at the site level, regional level, on a central server or SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud can be served from the cloud for execution. Other architecture solutions are possible and will depend on your IT infrastructure, latency requirements, and data volume, as well as security requirements. The bottom line is that the range of options that are possible with SAP can address latency concerns between automation systems and MES. It is worth noting that there are some scenarios involving production control that are never orchestrated through an MES system. For example, if there is a 10ms response time requirement to stop a conveyor in case of a robotic arm failure, this scenario should be controlled through a PLC or some sort of IOT device that is directly tied to the robot’s IO system. Going through an MES system for any type of safety response requiring IO action (robot stops moving, conveyor stops moving etc.) is NOT the correct approach. ERP system availability: Through robust HA/DR design and maintenance practices, many companies today operate ERP with 99.9% or better uptime availability. Furthermore, SAP manages thousands of companies’ ERP systems in the cloud, and in 2019 we had an average service level of 99.993%. We don’t feel like ERP availability is an issue at this point in time, and running SAP PEO embedded in ERP is low risk from an availability concern perspective. It is also important to note that the executive leadership of the major A&D companies likewise do not believe this is an issue. In the early days of SAP PEO design, we consulted with the CIOs from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Textron, Safran, Newport News, etc. When presented with 2 choices – S/4HANA Manufacturing distributed or S/4HANA Manufacturing single instance - they overwhelmingly voted single instance.  They do not see S/4 downtime as an issue. With that said, SAP ME is not dependent on ERP uptime and will continue to run even if the ERP system goes down for maintenance or otherwise.  Production orders and associated master data are downloaded into the ME system upon release to the shop floor for future execution.  In case of a disruption between ME and ERP, the ME system will continue to run the production floor based on the production order data that have been downloaded already.  Transactional data from the ME system to ERP will get buffered and executed once the connection has been reestablished. In short, we don’t have any major concerns in this area. MES system availability: Depending on the uptime requirements, SAP ME can be installed following a HA and DR setup, allowing for automated failover. Upon review of the customer’s detailed requirements as well as infrastructure setup a recommendation can be provided. Cybersecurity A foundational principle of protection from cyber threats is to minimize the number of threat vectors that can be used by malicious actors, harden the assets you have and maintain proper failover redundancy. SAP’s perspective is that it is preferable to centralize where you can (i.e., where SAP PEO makes sense for the production use case) and distribute if necessary (to the edge when needed for highly automated, low latency situations). We are NOT a proponent of distributing IT applications for the sole purpose of providing “security buffers.” SAP has extensive experience implementing highly secure approaches to securing industrial IOT networks in distributed environments, and a good summary of principals can be found here: Practical Industrial IoT Security: SAP’s Digital Manufacturing Landscape Practical Industrial IoT Security Part 2: SAP’s Latest Digital Manufacturing Landscape We completely understand reluctance to adopt industrial IoT or Digital Manufacturing for security concerns, but SAP believes that security concerns should not be the main obstacle to embark on digital transformation in Manufacturing. The risk without question goes up, but we would argue this risk is controllable. We can make smart choices that limit the attack vector and avoid bad decisions that jeopardize the security of networks that we are currently reasonably comfortable with. A lot of security discussions in industrial IoT take place in the abstract, and can easily increase fear and doubt, rather than mitigate them. By instead looking at a real landscape and analyzing the actual data flows, we can have concrete discussions how to protect such environments and make progress. As always, we recognize that this is an emerging field. Things move quickly and we will keep monitoring new developments. But we are increasingly convinced we have the tools and expertise to get this right. Now, it’s primarily a question of execution. ... View more

Let´s put things right into perspective at the beginning. When the aviation industry talks about BIG DATA they really mean a lot of data. Data which is usually collected by sensors on one aircraft covering more than 300,000 parameters. Out of these parameters engine data are one of the most important set of data points they capture. Let´s take an average commercial aircraft  - like the Boeing 737. The aircraft has two engines where each of the engines creates 20 terabytes of information per engine hour. Multiply this by an average six-hour cross-country flight from New York to Los Angles and you get 240TB of data for every engine hour. Alone in the United States you have approx. 28,500+ commercial flights in the sky on any given day. Now multiply this with 365 days a year and you get a real big, big data challenge. And this is just for commercial flights and just the data from two engines. According to the US National Air Traffic Controllers Association a total of 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States on any given day. This includes major airlines, cargo, planes to hire and military aircrafts. The Big Data Challenge Picture credit: HP Let´s stay with this number of engine data collected only from the commercial aircraft engines in one year. 2,499,841,200 TB equals 1,527,000,000,000,000,000,000 quintillion books (avg. of 100 pages, 1800 characters on each page). Even if you would have a army of aircraft maintenance service engineers, this would be a lot of books to read through to make sense out of this data for the next 100 years to come. One other comparision to understand the scale of this amount of data would be: the ten digit TB figure mentioned above converts to approx. 2,7 Zettabytes of data. This 2,7 ZB equals nearly three times of the total estimated global IP data traffic per year in 2015 (source: Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine). So how can a commercial aircraft manufacturer benefit from all of this data they collect and store? What would be the impact if they don´t make use of it? Big Cost Impact Typically in this industry they would use this sensor data to maximize operational efficiency. When an airline operator aquires a $100-390 million aircraft for its fleet, the goal is to keep the aircraft up and running for at least 18 hours a day for the next 15-20 years. At the heart of that effort is the airlines maintenance, repair, and overhaul organization, charged with handling both routine and nonroutine issues to keep that fleet up and running. Based on an analysis of International Air Transport Association (IATA) the leading cause of late flights (42%) are based on airline-controlled processes, such as maintenance. Every hour the aircraft is not in operation costs the airline operator an avg. $10,000. With the Challenges Come New Opportunities Predictive analysis can help turn huge amounts of maintenance-relevant data (whether machine data from sensors or logistic information from ERP systems) into actionable information, helping ensure that maintenance technicians execute the right work steps at the right time and with the right tools. Predictive analysis can help drive strategic improvements and provide better-quality output at lower operating cost and improved return on investment. With the introduction of in-memory technology, the time and cost of analyzing massive quantities of data has been reduced dramatically, and makes it possible to perform predictive analysis against vast volumes of data in real time. The Race Is On These days every modern aircraft is equipped with a so called aircraft health monitoring system to monitor unanticipated events, and to reduce unscheduled maintenance and disruption in operations. Accoring to a recent research study from TechNavio the global market for these monitoring systems are expected to grow significantly in the next years. This is mainly based on new efficient aircrafts being produced to cope with the steep rising number of air passengers worldwide. The aerospace OEMs and speciality service players are building new alliances and partnerships to be first to market with novel and compelling Aircraft Health Monitoring offerings. The design concepts that originated in the early 1990s for the Integrated Diagnostics System are moving from theory to practice. The competition is real and now. The winners of this race will gain a "first to market" advantage capturing dollars and minds. To find out more about Digital Transformation for the Aerospace & Defense Industry, click here Follow me on @AeroPohl ... View more

We are offering several interesting opportunities for customers to influence SAP’s Discrete Industries Solutions. Discrete industries are those which manufacture finished products that are distinct items capable of being easily counted, touched, or seen. Under Discrete Industries we have – Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, High Tech, Industrial Machinery and Components. An exciting opportunity to influence SAP has begun with the first cycle in 2022. The SAP Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI) enables you as an SAP customer or partner, to get early insights into SAP’s product developments and directly work with the developers to define and shape future product directions. The projects will be open for customer registration until March 11, 2022. Discrete Industries projects for registration: Circular Manufacturing SAP Ariba Intelligent Buying Analytics for SAP Global Trade Services Overhead Cost Calculation and Assignment to Cost Objects and Market Segments PLM System Integration - Feature Pack 2 SAP Enterprise Product Development for discrete industry: Product Structure and Digital Thread Digital Vehicle Financials Intelligent Quote for IM&C Intelligent Routing for IM&C Registration for Indirect Taxation Abroad (RITA) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Warranty Management for SAP S/4HANA & Industry Cloud SAP Complaint Handling (Industry Cloud) Lot-size-of-One for Component Manufacturers in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Smart Sensing for the Edge AI enabled Visual Inspection Integration of Handling Units (HUs) with Kanban Support the creation of SAP Fiori Apps for Inbound Delivery Management Machine Translation for Web Assistant 3rd Party Web Assistant for a dedicated 3rd party application B2B Account Profiling with Scores Supply Chain Resilience Customer Learning Advisory Panel INVENT - Composable Enterprise Blockchain, Workflow and BPI for Intelligent Cross-Company Processes Automation SAP Business Ecology Management Multimodal Payments Hub for Invoice managmenet SAP Outcome-Based Business Insights Investigation into a Digital Dressing Room Equipment sensor data anomaly detection & extensibility Asset maintenance - embedded business intelligence / analytics How do I register on the Customer Influence website? A short overview about how to find and register for a CEI project can be found on influence.sap.com. Follow-up after registration: When you register for a project, you will be invited to an introductory call with the SAP project lead. At this point further participation is optional. Typically, all activities are governed by the Feedback Agreement with SAP. If you are also interested in other CEI projects that are currently open for registration, see here the full list. Thank you in advance for your participation!   ... View more