Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are well-known data aggregators used to better manage a business, but how can they be used for manufacturing?
In the video above, we discuss how manufacturers are beginning to bridge front office operations with live data from the shop floor with Bryan Hicks, director of IIoT business development at SAP America, Inc.
“Many people know SAP as just an ERP company, but we’ve looked at it in a more holistic perspective of how any data from any source can affect your business process. Part of that data is what is coming from the IIoT,” Hicks said.
When aggregating collected data, marrying data that includes maintenance records, supplier information and HR training records can present unique insights into troubleshooting and business development.
“A lot of the value that we’ve seen is taking operational technology data from the shop floor and marrying it together with business data.”
Hicks shared a customer experience where a problem was solved thanks to this technique.
“We had a customer who was having an issue with a particular piece of equipment. When we married their data together, we discovered the issue only occurred when specific technicians worked on the equipment. They then traced it back to an instructor that taught those technicians, who was really the root cause of the issue. Without the combination of their business data and their shop floor data, they may have never have found that out,” Hicks said.
Data collected can even be shared with repair and maintenance teams to ensure fast response times for when equipment fails or begins to trend towards failure.
“Say for example, I’m a manufacturer of a piece of equipment, which is operating on someone else’s shop floor and I remotely monitor it,” Hicks explained. “If it’s about to fail, I can send my technician out to fix it before the customer’s operator even knows there’s a problem.”
For more information, watch the video above or visit SAP America’s website.