In the rapidly evolving world of manufacturing, staying competitive means embracing intelligent solutions. Optimizing your manufacturing future is a strategic imperative of digital transformation, and SAP Digital Manufacturing offers the advanced capabilities needed to not just meet today’s demands but to strategically shape your shop floor for unparalleled efficiency, visibility, and long-term success.
SAP Digital Manufacturing for Digital Transformation
When planning any shop floor transformation, it’s critical to evaluate requirements and opportunities across all business levels, and it’s advantageous to invest in a manufacturing platform strategically. This can ensure strong performance across key operational KPIs AND the needed visibility, predictability, and agility to drive productivity. This ultimately contributes to long-term profitability and stakeholder satisfaction. A selected platform should meet your organization’s immediate needs and be equipped to drive future innovations.
SAP Digital Manufacturing (DM) is a low-code, fully configurable manufacturing execution system (MES). SAP DM enhances the control, integration, and execution of the manufacturing process and enables global data visibility and analysis, connecting the shop floor to the top floor to optimize resources and efficiency.
To understand the broader impact of this shift, explore why digital transformation in the supply chain with SAP DM is essential.
SAP DM in Real-world Scenarios
SAP’s Digital Manufacturing is a unique player in the MES market, supporting full-scale discrete and process manufacturing. To help give a tangible feel for how SAP DM can bring value in a variety of industries and manufacturing environments, we’ve outlined a handful of possible use cases below.
Digitize Shop Floor Workflows
A hydraulic cylinder manufacturer’s Industry 4.0 initiatives are driving them to:
Hydraulic Cylinder Manufacturer
- Replace paper travelers
- Build a central repository for shop floor documentation
- Electronically record and validate required production and in-line inspection data
- Capture and report material consumption for order genealogy and inventory tracking
- File and track quality defects
- Automatically permit/restrict work according to a skills & certification matrix
- Establish seamless data exchange with ERP to maintain single system of record- Master data (material, BOM, routing, order)- Transactional data (yield, scrap, goods issues and receipts)
SAP DM can drive this digital execution and synchronization of orders through their machining, subassembly, and final assembly operations.
Material Replenishment Synchronization & Inventory Control
An HVAC manufacturer needs to better align lineside inventory with actual production usage. Their final assembly lines currently experience frequent shortages for some materials and carry consistent overages for others
HVAC Manufacturer
SAP DM can directly communicate with SAP EWM to establish a full circle pull replenishment system, automatically signaling when material is needed on the floor, delivered to the floor, consumed, scrapped, or removed, and when products are completed and/or packed.
HR and Shop Floor Collaboration for Labor Schedules
A chemical processing plant’s supervisors manage schedules for a very large workforce on paper. This is time-consuming, relies on a heavy amount of tribal knowledge and experience, and results in significant reworking of schedules as conditions and employee availability constantly change.
Chemical Processing Plant
SAP DM can leverage employee training certification and availability data from SAP Success Factors and provide supervisors with a visual drag & drop tool to manage labor schedules by work center, shift, day, week, etc.
Shop Floor Process & Equipment Automation
A cement manufacturing plant uses PLCs to monitor weigh scales, lab & testing machines, and processing equipment. There is no system in place to bring plant-wide visibility or unify and analyze the data being collected.
Cement Manufacturer
SAP DM, along with Plant Connectivity, can establish bi-directional communication with tooling & equipment to exchange production data, quality inspection data, runtimes, etc., and to provide plant-level visibility into system performance.
Real-time, Remote Asset Monitoring
A chemical distribution facility needs 24/7 monitoring of the fill levels for a large number of chemical tanks, but can only access the sensor from a single computer in their back-office control room.
Chemical Distribution facility
SAP DM’s Line Monitor can allow anyone authorized to view real-time sensor data and be notified of critical-level alarms from anywhere in the world.
Single Shop Floor Operations Platform
A Tier 1 automotive parts supplier runs disparate point solutions for the following shop floor operations.
Automotive Parts Manufacturer
• Label Printing
• Genealogy Data Collection – for Process and Discrete Manufacturing Lines
• eKanban / Material Delivery & Tracking
• Labor Tracking
• Scrap Reporting
• Labor Scheduling
• Order Scheduling
• Machine Utilization & OEE Tracking
• Data Analytics
SAP DM can merge all these functions into a single platform.
How Stellium Drives Manufacturing Excellence with SAP Digital Manufacturing
SAP Digital Manufacturing is revolutionizing shop floor operations across diverse industries. At Stellium, we’re your dedicated partner in harnessing its full power. Our deep manufacturing value chain and systems expertise ensure your organization can strategically leverage SAP Digital Manufacturing’s capabilities, adapting and thriving in today’s dynamic manufacturing and supply chain landscape.
If you’re considering the evolution of your manufacturing IT landscape, including a move from legacy systems, learn more about future-proofing your IT manufacturing landscape from SAP MII to SAP DM.
Stellium provides end-to-end services for SAP Digital Manufacturing, covering everything from initial discovery and future-readiness assessments to expert process consulting, seamless solution implementation, and ongoing value realization. We bring a seasoned team with extensive experience, committed to delivering successful solutions that blend industry best practices with the innovation each client needs for a competitive edge in their market.
To transform your operations and achieve true manufacturing excellence, learn more at SAP Digital Manufacturing and Talk to Us about your SAP Digital Manufacturing needs today!