Industry 4.0 with SAP

Industry 4.0 – what changes is it bringing?

Many companies attempt to implement solutions in this field, including the latest technologies related mainly to production, logistics, and storage. Technologies such as the internet of things and the development of artificial intelligence have undoubtedly introduced a market revolution in this area.

What is Industry 4.0?

According to many voices, we are on the verge of rapid technological changes. They are directly related to the challenges modern companies are facing. They are increasingly failing to cope with the accumulation of vast volumes of data, and are facing increasing problems in managing supply chains or overly complicated internal processes.

In response to these and many other issues, the fourth industrial revolution is coming. It changes the foundations of the functioning of companies, which thanks to it become “intelligent”. This affects not only the processes within companies but even our daily lives:

Will every machine have its digital twin?

Digital Twin is a software copy of the machine. By creating the right software and combining it with the device, it gains a kind of twin equivalent that supervises and manages the activities related to these devices.

It allows machines to “feel and recognize”. This is possible by using sensor data attached to the devices and processing them in algorithms based, for example, on machine learning and image recognition.

This saves on maintenance and maintenance costs, streamlines production processes and even reduces the resources needed to operate equipment.

Industry 4.0 in SAP

SAP understands Industry 4.0 as a combination of people, things, and processes. The path to be followed for this purpose includes digitalization, which entails changes in the structure of functioning of whole enterprises.

An example of a solution supporting the transformation of companies into Industry 4.0 is SAP Leonardo. It is a modern environment that enables the integration of production systems with business processes. This ensures complete transparency and access to the analytics.

Another interesting feature is SAP Predictive Maintenance. This tool allows to optimize capital operations, analyze real-time data, combine sensor data with business information, get predictions about future equipment status, and even predict potential machine failures and system errors.

By using the SAP Cloud Platform, the system can collect and process data in real time. This secure cloud environment provides rich capabilities for the rapid development of applications that download data from the internet of things devices and take advantage of artificial intelligence or big data.