SAP and Endress+Hauser work on joint IIoT solutions

SAP and Endress+Hauser have announced they will intensify their cooperation in the development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications for the process industry. In future, both companies intend to work closer together in the development of joint solutions, sales and customer implementation.

The goal is to fully integrate the Endress+Hauser field instruments as digital twins into the SAP cloud platform. Both companies want to take advantage of the services and smart apps from SAP’s Leonardo system as well as Endress+Hauser’s IIoT offering. The idea is to tightly integrate master and sensor data, as well as measurement values, into customer business, logistics and production processes and develop new digital services focused on predictive maintenance and predictive quality. An open platform concept forms the basis for this approach.

“Two innovative companies have come together here to realise the end-to-end OT/IT integration from field instrument all the way to business processes,” said Hala Zeine, SAP’s President of Digital Supply Chain and Manufacturing.

“When it comes to digitalisation, successful companies will be those able to tie their systems directly to business processes, thus reliably and fully opening up or circumventing the classic automation pyramid,” explained Matthias Altendorf, CEO of the Endress+Hauser Group. “We and SAP share a common vision of implementing this strategy to the benefit of our customers.”

Endress+Hauser’s role in the partnership involves delivering the field instrumentation knowledge — so critical to plant operators — in the form of digital services, which will be implemented by integrating the existing Endress+Hauser IIoT services and the SAP platform using a standardised approach. From the initial creation and automatic updating of a digital twin across the entire product life cycle, to end-to-end connectivity from the sensor to the SAP IT platform, Endress+Hauser is supporting the digitalisation strategy of its entire customer base.

SAP demonstrates the concrete benefits of the SAP Leonardo system as an innovation platform. In the SAP Asset Intelligence Network, field instruments are represented as digital twins, which serve as a basis for integration into the customer’s business processes. Using SAP Leonardo technologies like machine learning, analytics and blockchain, intelligent services can be flexibly enabled for the production environment. Innovations in the area of maintenance and optimisation will help customers achieve the two primary goals of reducing operational costs and increasing productivity.