Manufacturers Revitalize Operations With SAP HANA®

WALLDORF, Germany, Sept. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the introduction of the SAP HANA® platform into solutions supporting "idea to performance," a holistic business approach to managing the entire life cycle of a product, from design to service. To help customers reimagine how they do business with access to real-time operational data, SAP HANA will power the latest versions of manufacturing and research and development (R & D) solutions from SAP. The portfolio, including the SAP® Overall Equipment Effectiveness Management (SAP OEE Management) application, the 6.0 version of the SAP® Portfolio and Project Management application and the SAP® Energy and Environmental Resource Management solution, represents the cornerstone of this "idea to performance" approach.  

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Customers today are looking for solutions to help solve the new realities of the latest real-time business challenges. SAP HANA was designed to serve as a foundation for a new breed of real-time applications that go beyond simply accelerating existing business processes, to create new customer value based on freshly available insights. The strengths of SAP HANA help deliver results in line with the pillars of this "idea to performance" approach:

• Sustainable innovation: Manage market-driven product innovation while streamlining the innovation process
• Responsive manufacturing: Minimize order fulfillment cycle time while maintaining the ability to support different manufacturing processes and order variability
• Operational excellence: Cost-effectively and proactively control operational risks that can adversely affect safety, quality, reliability and asset productivity

"With SAP, today we can get transparency on energy consumption, which has a direct positive impact on our cost," said Klaus Siegemund, senior manager, IT Area Operations, Ferrero. "With the new SAP Energy and Environmental Resource Management solution, we anticipate to further improve the near real-time aspects of energy and leverage new innovative analytics and charting capabilities with SAP HANA."

Improve Responsive Manufacturing
Manufacturing issues are unavoidable — resources are not always reliable, machines need maintenance, raw material issues jeopardize product quality and operators make mistakes. SAP OEE Management is intended to offer visibility into these major sources of manufacturing performance loss. Such visibility into the overall production plan and plant utilization helps managers reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. This includes helping reduce speed loss and minor stops due to bottlenecks, blocks and jams that do not require maintenance. The benefits shall help lead to a lower cost of manufacturing via improved product quality, higher resource utilization, decreased asset downtime and minimized performance loss.

On an enterprise level, by leveraging SAP OEE Management powered by SAP HANA, it is aimed that managers will be able to compare and benchmark the performance of similar assets from different facilities, providing insights into expected performance and detecting variances. This is intended to enable the faster identification of root cause and resolution, driving continuous process improvement. Operational performance information shall be combined with the business context to improve decision-making, which is planned to help increase schedule adherence, allocate capital more efficiently and improve quality enhancing customer satisfaction. The intended ability to monitor and improve the effectiveness of manufacturing processes will not only improve the individual plant's performance, but also provide an opportunity for broader business and supply chain performance improvements.

Optimize Large Product Portfolio Management
Organizations today are increasingly pressured to produce more products both tailored to specific customer needs and with shorter life cycles. With each new product, a manager must ascertain whether the money, people and plant space are available. From there, to manage new products in portfolios efficiently, each activity in each plant needs to be handled simultaneously with a portfolio view. This means looking across all new products at once to ensure they are on budget, on time, resourced and on a path to becoming profitable. In overseeing these individual tasks, a massive amount of transactional data must be analyzed. Given increasing complexity, a traditional system often cannot manage this level of data.

With the planned inclusion of SAP HANA in the 6.0 version of SAP Portfolio and Project Management, an integrated approach is intended to allow a manager to see a holistic view of all the aspects of the projects within the portfolio. The central starting point for all users aims to be accelerated, bringing project managers and project team members together. Portfolio management is aimed to happen in real time, allowing a manager to drill down instantaneously into a project and work with the data to tackle any red flags. Different activities within the project, including those that require payment, specific tools or procurement action, are also envisioned to be displayed, and portfolio dashboards shall be accelerated. It is planned that the end results will lead to enhanced project efficiency and user productivity and improved support for the calculation of the most relevant financial key performance indicators.

Drive Operational Excellence
Financial officers and operations managers at manufacturing companies struggle to control energy costs and are faced with a complex landscape of data, intricate standards for compliance and a volatile energy market. Powered by SAP HANA, SAP Energy and Environmental Resource Management was developed to meet these challenges as a next-generation analytics and planning solution that enables companies to optimize their energy spend and reduce emissions.

SAP Energy and Environmental Resource Management is intended to look at energy data embedded at operational and enterprise levels. Data from the shop-floor level of a plant shall be pulled and integrated using the SAP® Manufacturing Intelligence and Integration (SAP MII) application. With the inclusion of SAP HANA, analytics shall then be able to be built on top of SAP MII to share the data in real time. SAP HANA shall further help to quickly calculate metrics such as carbon and energy intensities, and aggregate data in real time from across multiple sources. This shall lead to the availability of important information such as machine outages, and shall also enable the planning and monitoring of corporate energy and environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as near real-time tracking for operational performance. Users shall be able to consolidate, prioritize and track energy improvement initiatives to meet energy savings goals or support standards in a systematic approach, helping to reduce costs. Additionally, the energy analytics are planned to be pushed out via mobile devices to various stakeholders in the organization.

"Without real-time data, manufacturers face an inability to adapt quickly as conditions change," said Scott Bolick, head of Idea to Performance, SAP. "By augmenting solutions with the capabilities of SAP HANA, we can offer customers the ability to store a broader selection of manufacturing enterprise and operational data, to analyze these larger complex data sets for new business insights and then to take action on these insights with our 'idea to performance' approach — all at speeds not previously possible."

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 248,500 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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For more information, press only:
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SOURCE SAP AG

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