PLM Alliance at SAPPHIRE NOW® Showcased SAP® Engineering Control Center: Where the Digital Twin Begins!

In the world of Internet of Things, fast-moving competitive environments, and the increasing complexity of customer requirements, digital data represents one of the most effective means of powering and supporting strategic innovation. With unprecedented speed, digital data connects companies with global customers and suppliers in real time while enabling extraordinary achievements for companies handling this data the right way.

With the showcase “SAP Engineering Control Center: Where the Digital Twin Begins”, the PLM Alliance enforced its dedication to delivering the foundational layer enabling digital transformation for manufacturing companies through integration of mechanical and electrical CAD authoring tools into SAP® software. Establishing real-time connection to products from ideation through creation enables vast control over every step of the product development lifecycle. Manufacturers can benefit enterprise-wide with the SAP Engineering Control Center integration tool to Autodesk AutoCAD and Inventor, Dassault Systems CATIA V5 and SolidWorks, PTC Creo, Siemens NX and Solid Edge, as well as EPLAN Electric P8 and more.

Many of the booth’s visitors said they were amazed to see how manufacturers benefit from the integrated “digital twin” approach for SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM). The visitors learned how manufacturers can use SAP S/4HANA® for digital innovation by connecting data, information, and processes that tie virtual and real products together in an intelligent way to follow through the entire lifecycle from design, production, delivery, usage, and service, to end-of-life.

PLM Alliance’s participation stems from the growing need among customers running SAP software to enable closed-loop engineering and the digital thread without increasing complexity of overall system architecture. The embedded SAP solutions allow cross-departmental business users to access, manage, and control real-time product development data. This helps ensure that quality, time to market, and overall product development costs are managed on time and on target without the need for multiple systems and potential break points slowing down business.

At the PLM Alliance Live Theater Presentation “Real Life User Experience: How to Make Engineers Want SAP PLM” visitors gained insights on how engineers can easily and intuitively access the powerful SAP system without the use of transaction codes or specialist knowledge. Visitors learned how to enable enterprise product development with real-time visibility through the digital supply chain and got a first-hand look at the SAP Engineering Control Center integrated with MCAD, ECAD, and MS Office applications. After the presentation, inspiring discussions around how SAP PLM maximizes efficiency gains for the extended enterprise and results from successful implementations were shared.

SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference are the world’s premier business technology event and largest SAP customer-run conference, offering attendees the opportunity to learn and network with customers, SAP executives, partners and experts across the entire SAP ecosystem. The three days of SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference made it quite clear: collaboration using intelligent systems is a key element for future engineering and product development. ”SAP Engineering Control Center and SAP PLM provide ideal conditions precisely for this!” was the opinion of many visitors to the SAP PLM Alliance partner booth, who were clearly impressed by the showcase of SAP Engineering Control Center “Where the Digital Twin Begins!” DSC Software and the PLM Alliance Partners Cenit, CIDEON, EPLAN, and .riess engineering received a consistently positive response to their solutions and were very satisfied with the results of the event.

“By using SAP PLM with SAP Engineering Control Center we have seen not only streamlining of our processes and simplicity in our BOM integration. Just generally for our users – the engineers – to have one cockpit where they’re not bouncing back and forth between an ERP system and a PLM system…. that’s a big difference”   

David Gauthier, Director Business Information Systems, Janicki Industries
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7nBr-M4Ib8&t=22s

“What we like most about the SAP Engineering Control Center is the ease of use, its ability to link different objects together…you can run multiple authoring tools and have one constant backbone, that allows teams to work together and just be more productive.”

John Koester, Director Technical Information Systems, Molex
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OevKmZAQk1M

“We have implemented SAP ECTR on 35 sites and you can see that the same product has a different information setup in different places… with SAP ECTR we’ve been able to put all this information into our system in one place, so that there is one single source of truth and that’s extremely important for us.”

Peter Bryngelsson, Business Development Sales, Sandvik Coromant
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWgoiCaYuKo

SAP, SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP S/4HANA and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.