SAP has long had a substantial presence in manufacturing for its ERP software, but in recent years has brought newer technologies to bear on manufacturing operations. It made two more significant moves in that direction this week at the Hannover Messe industrial trade show in Germany, announcing partnerships with Mitsubishi Electric and robotics manufacturer Kuka.
"SAP is playing to its established strengths by adding the integration of capabilities and data between operational technology and automation to enterprise information technology systems, plus adding the Intelligence of HANA and the GUI interfaces of Fiori to create new levels of integrated functionality," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
Under the first deal, Mitsubishi will use data generated from its factory automation capabilities with SAP's IoT (Internet of Things) technology to create new services for remote device management, production monitoring and predictive maintenance.
Mitsubishi sells products across the full spectrum of factory automation, such as programmable controllers, human-machine interfaces, power distribution products and industrial robots. It's already done some work to connect with SAP software at a deeper level, such as a connector it introduced last year that pushes shop floor data directly into SAP ERP.
Meanwhile, KUKA plans to integrate its robots with SAP Cloud Platform, again for scenarios such as predictive maintenance and factory floor monitoring. It will also develop robot applications based on SAP's IoT platform, but details on what functions those will focus on weren't disclosed. Finally, KUKA will incorporate some elements of SAP technology into its homegrown Industrie 4.0 platform, Connyun.
Overall, the goal is to connect "the top floor with the shop floor," as one SAP executive said in a statement.
Hannover Messe was the proper place for SAP to introduce the new partnerships, given what a prominent event it is for the world's major industrial companies.
The deals represent not only SAP's desire to expand further into manufacturing, but also its ongoing transition to a cloud business model. While on-premises software license sales actually rose 13 percent year over year in the first quarter, for SAP and other large software vendors, the rush is on to migrate customers to the cloud, both for operational efficiencies and over the long term, more money. Manufacturing systems generate massive amounts of data and by partnering with the likes of Mitsubishi, SAP hopes to push more workloads to its cloud services.
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