Endress+Hauser Announces Collaboration with SAP as a Core Partner of the Future Factory Initiative of the SAP Research Center in Dresden

SAP Research is the global technology research unit of SAP. The group significantly contributes to SAP’s product portfolio and extends its leading position in the market by identifying and shaping emerging IT trends and generating breakthrough technologies through applied research.

Within the next few months the companies will collaborate to jointly develop a fully integrated scenario for remote service management based on a device integration software prototype developed by researchers of SAP Research Center Dresden and the development task force of Endress+Hauser InfoServe and Endress+Hauser Process Solutions. This groundbreaking solution will help the maintenance crews in process plants across the world reduce plant downtime and operating costs. The device manufacturers’ service departments will be enabled to increase their service efficiency and speed.

Endress+Hauser’s intelligent measuring instruments will become fully enabled as smart devices that are able to create error tickets, notifications or alerts via ‘plant access points’, and to transfer processing data to the service management application for installed-base configuration and management as well as for service-related processes.Within the scope of the cooperation, Endress+Hauser will further enable its lifecycle management strategy web-enabled asset management W@M, which is based on the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, to directly integrate measuring devices (i.e., assets) into business systems. The target of this strategy is to increase plant availability by simultaneously decreasing maintenance costs.

“Across the limitless universe of data available, it is more crucial than ever to transform and deliver asset data as business-critical information across an organization, to the right people and integrated in the right processes,” says Eugenio F. da Silva Neto, project manager of Endress+Hauser’s task force. “Endress+Hauser and SAP are collaborating to facilitate information exchange, helping to make the information more valuable to our customers, for example through condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. One of our major goals is to overcome the typical limitations of the automation pyramid model – data confinement and complexity – to map and access all relevant asset information in the plant. We would like to achieve it via open, scalable, lean and secure process automation and IT platforms and prove that real-time asset data with transaction information may be merged and transformed in more than one place, in fact wherever it makes sense, and make information accessible whenever it is needed.”

“The remote service management scenario will significantly extend our portfolio of use cases in the Future Factory Lab,” said Dr Uwe Kubach, vice president and head of SAP Research Center Dresden. “It will address requirements often requested by customers, and will provide answers and innovative solutions that go beyond manufacturing processes. Teaming with Endress+Hauser on this scenario proves that we’re also focusing on business aspects that will deliver smooth and robust runtime processes in a factory environment.”

Demonstration models of the integrated scenario are scheduled to be available in the Future Factory Lab at the SAP Research Center Dresden by the third quarter of 2010. The demonstrations will show both device integration scenarios at a customer’s site and at Endress+Hauser, highlighting integration with the SAP® enterprise asset management solution, which can also be used for common customer presentations.

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