Today, nailing product development means getting a grip on managing product structures and being efficient.
These product structures are the master plan for your product, laying out all its parts, connections, and setups from start to finish. To boost speed and efficiency, manufacturers need to team up with suppliers in the early stages of product development, and integrating product data from various tools is crucial.
In this blog post, I want to dig into what organizations need from their product structures to ace the whole design, development, production, and maintenance game, as well as how Product Data Integration steps up to the plate for increased speed and efficiency. I’ll discuss how cloud-based SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM in the Cloud) helps businesses meet these requirements.
Discussions with customers in the context of numerous implementation projects for the "classic" on-premise PLM software from SAP in recent years have shown that the customers' product development departments—especially in the discrete industry—have requirements for the SAP solution that go beyond the standard functionality of the classic bill of material in SAP S/4HANA.
First, there is a need for an SAP solution for abstract modeling of product structures, without having to create an SAP material master for each product component and thus causing the typically cost-intensive business processes for maintaining material master.
The product structure should be an integration hub for the various product development disciplines to integrate and manage the product data from the authoring systems such as mechanical CAD systems, electrical/electronic CAD systems or software development environments as one mechatronic system before the product is handed over to production.
Managing different versions of a product, like different colors, should be possible without needing the powerful but complex SAP LO-VC or SAP S/4HANA advanced variant configuration systems, which require experts and have some technical and logistical implications. The product structure or a configured variant should be able to be visualized in 3D for simulation and communication purposes, for example by a product manager, without the need to use the native authoring system such as a CAD system.
It should also be possible to implement an iterative and traceable design process in which version statuses can be clearly and comprehensibly defined.
With the introduction of the enterprise product structure (EPS), SAP addresses all these requirements and lays the foundation for a pivotal point in product data management, around which all product development processes could revolve in the future.
The key to the success of the new solution will be the expansion of the application's range of functions, which can be based on the example of the iPPE product structure. Furthermore, strong performance of the application is important when dealing with large product structures in EPS.
Finally, integration plays a central role: There must be adapters for the common authoring systems to be able to fill the EPS with product data. It must also be possible to transfer the EPS into a manufacturing bill of material (“ready to be consumed by an MRP run”) and initiate the logistical processes in several, globally distributed SAP S/4HANA systems.
With the introduction of Product Data Integration (PDI) and Intelligent Handover, SAP has already taken the first steps in this direction and has given a hint of how future implementation projects of SAP PLM in the cloud could fully meet customer requirements with standard functionality.
With the release of SAP PLM in the Cloud in May 2024, SAP published the first version of PDI. With PDI, the Enterprise Product Structure can be enriched with product data from authoring systems such as mechanical CAD systems, electrical/electronic CAD systems, or software/application lifecycle management systems. This makes the EPS the central integration point of product development processes.
For many years now, SAP Engineering Control Center (SAP ECTR) has provided a trustworthy authoring system integration for SAP S/4HANA on-premise and private versions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. From now on, PDI bridges the void and provides a go-to solution for authoring system integration for public cloud versions of SAP S/4HANA.
Technically, PDI is an API with attached cloud data storage. An authoring system requires a plugin that consumes the API. SAP involves partner companies to develop plugins for common authoring systems and gradually make them available via the SAP Store.
From a business point of view, PDI enables efficient collaboration between internal engineering departments and external suppliers. The internal engineering departments create user accounts on SAP Business Technology Platform for PDI for their external suppliers and provide the plugin for their authoring system. Internal engineering departments and external suppliers are then all set to collaborate directly on the structured product data (e.g. CAD assemblies) via the EPS. This is an advantage compared to the current "Collaboration" solution, in which the product data from the internal engineering department is first exported to the collaboration as an unstructured file list, then imported on the supplier side, modified, and uploaded again to the collaboration before being reimported on the internal side and transferred to the EPS structure. In the future, this collaboration use case can be expanded to a hybrid scenario.
Here’s an example: A company's product engineering department works with SAP ECTR, which runs on an on-premise SAP S/4HANA system and is tailored to the internal product development processes. PDI shall now be used for efficient collaboration with external suppliers, which makes the end-to-end process “hybrid.”
SAP should pave the way for such scenarios by integrating PDI and Engineering Control Center. Customers could share product data, like CAD assemblies, with their extended team through PDI. Plus, they could easily get it back from suppliers once they have finished their work and seamlessly continue their internal product development process.
Additional integration scenarios can be envisioned when looking at the capabilities of PDI and the EPS. Processes based on Microsoft Office 365 solutions (Word, Excel) or on the Adobe Creative Suite could converge in EPS, culminating in the integration of external PLM systems.
The potential of PDI is therefore large. I'm excited to see whether SAP can meet customer expectations and how integration scenarios will develop in the coming years.