Want to turn your factory into a smart, connected, and data-driven operation? SAP Digital Manufacturing brings Industry 4.0 to life with powerful tools for execution, insights, and automation.
SAP Digital Manufacturing is a cloud-based solution that enables manufacturers to efficiently execute manufacturing processes, monitor and analyze manufacturing operations data, integrate systems to enable smart factory based on the Industry 4.0 approach, and improvise productivity and performance leveraging capabilities, including out-of-the-box SAP integrations, AI and machine learning, and edge automation. The solution consists of the following core components:
- SAP Digital Manufacturing for execution
- SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights
- SAP Digital Manufacturing for edge computing
In this blog post, we’ll talk about the key features for these solution components.
SAP Digital Manufacturing for Execution
SAP Digital Manufacturing for execution provides the capabilities for shop-floor manufacturing process execution (supports both discrete and process industries), monitoring and optimization for resources and execution. The solution includes user-specific SAP Fiori-based operation dashboards along with a configurable Production Operator Dashboard (POD) to orchestrate and control the shop floor, monitoring KPIs such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and downtime events.
It includes out-of-the box integration to SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) to enable seamless integrated processes, and automation interfaces to enable shop-floor driven manufacturing.
Below are some of the key features for SAP Digital Manufacturing for execution (non-exhaustive):
Production Operator Dashboard (POD)
Dashboard with configurable and extensible GUI to suit the need of the operator depending on the role or specific usage. There are various POD types: work center, operation activity, order, custom, standalone nonconformance, and monitor. Each POD type queues the operator’s work per the respective business process.
The dashboard can be used to enable the production execution process by calling SAP transactions on cloud to post the production and quality process transactions, and also for monitoring and reporting the progress. There are options to customize fields for posting production, activity confirmation, and consumptions. Event notifications and action buttons can be set and triggered by the operator for specific events or needed follow-ups.
For example, a work center POD type includes a work list of multiple shop-floor control (SFC) activities with associated status, attached work instructions, drilldown details, and availability on a given work center.
Work-In-Process (WIP) Management
This feature allows a seamless coordination between the operation supervisor working with management of orders and the operator who is focused on his respective SFC activities associated with the orders, as shown in the figure below. The goal is to enable an integrated end-to-end manufacturing execution process flow with central visibility and control at every point.
The feature facilitates the Industry 4.0 concept of one-piece flow. Orders can be started and completed through the routing operation activities, and routings can be enriched with work instructions and data collection groups downloaded from SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SFCs can be split into multiple ones or merged into a new SFC depending on how the operator wants to optimize the process flow.
It includes other essential features such as logging nonconformances against process lots, triggering component assembly, raising alerts and notifications, and creating and executing logistics orders to track WIP transportation on the shop floor.
Floor Stock and Batch Management
Floor stock management can be used to manage the material stock that is stored before being used in manufacturing. This provides the option to be used as standalone inventory functionality to create and manage floor stock records in SAP Digital Manufacturing locally, including inventory creation, floor stock reservation, and storage location assignment.
However, the inventory transactions can also be transferred and synchronized from SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP EWM. An individual or consolidated inventory management mode is available in SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud integration to be activated. If using a third-party system, corresponding inventories can also be imported, viewed, and edited as the single source of inventories with transfer to SAP Digital Manufacturing.
Regarding batch management, it’s important to note that batch numbers can be created locally or can be transferred from SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Batch numbers and batch characteristics can be retrieved in real time if they are transferred.
Resource Orchestration and Order Scheduling
Resource orchestration is an important feature that facilitates management of shop floor workflows, assignments of labor, and scheduling or reservation of available production tools to work centers and resources.
Scheduling and Dispatching
With this functionality, production supervisors can create and schedule workloads for the resources and work centers based on availability. The Dispatching and Monitoring dashboard, as shown in the next figure, provides a graphical view of the capacity overload situation and helps resolve bottleneck situations.
This is integrated with labor and tools assignment to the workloads, and the supervisor can set any alerts for gaps or missing assignments. Orders that are successfully released can be displayed with their SFC details. The dashboard facilitates automated dispatch of scheduled operations.
Labor Scheduling
This facilitates considering labor assignment during dispatching operations in a Gantt chart. This enables assignment of shifts to production operators, as well as assignment of work centers to production operators and shifts. The Labor Scheduling dashboard, as shown in the following figure, provides multiple views for the production supervisor or operator to use for specific tasks. This feature also provides skill management of workforce and integration with other systems such as SAP SuccessFactors for replicating workforce and availability data for labor planning.
Tools Scheduling
This feature enables scheduling or reserving the available production tools to work centers and resources for a calendar week/day, and assignment to a particular operation of a production/process order.
Visual Inspection Enabled with AI and Machine Learning
This feature provides both a manual visual inspection process and a machine learning–based visual inspection process enabling early identification of nonconformances in the manufacturing process. This includes, for instance, ensuring correct and complete assembly, shape, or appearance attributes. It facilitates improved overall quality yield for the manufactured products with an efficient quality inspection process.
Extensions
SAP Digital Manufacturing helps to connect top floor business systems to shop floor machines to provide global visibility across all plants with orchestration of shop floor execution and production operations tracking down to the individual work center. SAP provides several public APIs and a set of extensibility options along with SAP Digital Manufacturing, which can be used per specific business requirement. Key SAP Digital Manufacturing extensions includes business process extensions, UX extensions, and machine learning extensions for AI-enabled visual inspection
SAP Digital Manufacturing for Insights
SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights is a centralized, cloud-based, data-driven manufacturing performance management solution. It helps to track the resources, people, and machines performing the work to assess progress and manage the variations that arise from changes to the process. It improves production insights from the enterprise level to the plant level to raise continuous improvement in industrial environments. SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights offers the following features:
Manufacturing Insights
SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights enables analysis and optimization of manufacturing operations based on data collected by SAP Digital Manufacturing for execution. The manufacturing operations data is structured and stored in manufacturing data objects (MDOs) that are ready to use for your analytics. These MDOs can also be accessed using external APIs. To obtain deeper insights into the production processes, the solution provides advanced analytics features.
Data Engineering
Data engineering replicates data from on-premise systems to the cloud using applications that are specific to data engineering. This data is then available for analysis using SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights, covering various manufacturing use cases, such as consumption of analytical reports at a global scale.
Automation
Manufacturing automation enables machine integration from cloud to shop floor through Production Connectors. This enables capturing the communication provided by the machine and exchanging data from and to the shop floor, as well as calling services on shop floor systems. For instance, the Production Process Designer in the cloud can be used to design the production process, which can be called by observing conditions on the shop floor or by configuring alerts or the production operator dashboards.
SAP Digital Manufacturing for Edge Computing
This enables the processing of machine data at the edge, that is, the closure to the source of data on the shop floor, which allows for faster decision-making by the operator with minimal latency challenges. It enables synchronization of configuration and business data between the edge and the cloud. SAP Digital Manufacturing for edge computing provides a predefined set of functions that are available to be processed on the edge. It also provides GUIs to access these functions on the edge.
SAP Digital Manufacturing and SAP S/4HANA
SAP Digital Manufacturing provides out-of-the-box integration with SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP EWM. It can integrate with multiple SAP S/4HANA systems using one instance of SAP Integration Suite.
The figure below shows the integration flow between SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Digital Manufacturing, and SAP EWM for process industries. Process industry manufacturing involves mixing ingredients together into a recipe based on specific conditions to create a finished product. Process manufacturing products cannot usually be taken apart, as once mixed, the ingredients cannot be separated. Examples of process manufacturing include paint, drinks, and foodstuffs.
The final figure shows the integration flow between SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Digital Manufacturing, and SAP EWM for discrete industries. Discrete manufacturing involves assembling parts in a specific order to create a finished product. Discrete manufacturers use bills of materials (BOMs) to specify the contents of their products. Discrete manufacturing products can usually be taken apart, at least partially. Examples of discrete manufacturing include engines, cars, and electronic goods.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP S/4HANA: An Introduction by Devraj Bardhan, Axel Baumgartl, Madalina Dascalescu, Mark Dudgeon, Piotr Górecki, Asidhara Lahiri, Richard Maund, Bert Meijerink, and Andrew Worsley-Tonks. They are are a multinational author team working for IBM, SAP, and Accenture. They have
been working with SAP S/4HANA since its first release.
This post was originally published 6/2025.
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