“Supply chains are under stress,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the SAP executive board and head of its Product Engineering division, at the recent Hanover Fair. The past few years have shown how prone to failure global logistics chains are, and he added this also has far-reaching consequences for the German manufacturing industry. Digital supply chains, therefore, are needed to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and sustainable. “While companies are aware they need to invest in Industry 4.0 and AI to make their supply chain more resilient, many are still in the pilot phase,” Saueressig said, citing discussions with CEOs and results of a study by Oxford Economics.
Earlier this year, analysts asked nearly 1,000 people around the world in management from 15 industries about the digitization of their supply chains. As a result, managers in manufacturing were more inclined than those in other industries to introduce intelligent technologies on a large scale in order to make better predictions. However, only 36% of the companies surveyed would already use forward-looking analyses in one area of their company.
SAP builds AI into its supply-chain solutions
At the fair, SAP announced it would further expand its logistics chain solutions. SAP Digital Manufacturing, for instance, will be expanded with additional AI tools, which, according to a statement, will allow users to gain AI-supported insights and visual inspections in production to ensure that defective parts are discovered early in the production process and appropriate measures are taken quickly, thus reducing the reject rate and producing higher quality products. The number of complaints would also fall as a result, and the condition and maintenance of systems would be optimized, the provider said.
One of the first adopters of AI-enhanced SAP Digital Manufacturing is Smart Press Shop, a joint venture between Porsche and press manufacturer Schuler. Founded in 2019, the company seized its greenfield opportunity to rethink and redesign the press shop as part of a cloud-first development strategy. Hendrik Rothe, the company’s CEO, spoke of completely paperless production and a fully automated process to configure machines in the production line to cut set-up times nearly in half.
The dark factory dream
According to Rothe, there are many advantages to the digitalization of manufacturing based on the principles of Industry 4.0. In addition to self-optimizing production, continuous traceability, and resource-saving production, smaller batch sizes can also be produced economically. This is an important factor, especially in the automotive industry in the switch to electric vehicles because the quantities are smaller.
Rothe dreams of fully automated dark factories, but there’s still a way to go before those become a reality. According to him, operations are currently at 30 to 40% automation, although the potential varies greatly from area to area. While production itself is fully automated—order-controlled from the SAP system—things are different in the warehouse, as manual processes with forklift drivers continue to work more profitably. “Every automation has to pay off,” says Rothe, and automating transport processes in the warehouse is currently not economical.
