At this year’s Hannover Messe trade fair, SAP and its partners showed how they are embedding artificial intelligence (AI) in their products to help companies achieve new levels of excellence in manufacturing and other industries.
The glass bottles on the high-speed filling line made quiet clinking sounds as they sped around the bend of the track. The visitors to the SAP booth at the internationally renowned industrial trade fair were waiting for the moment when an optical sensor, using AI support, spotted the bottle that was only three-quarters full and kicked it out of the line and into a defects bay. “This system has a capacity of 6,400 bottles per hour,” said a grinning Ben Hughes from SAP’s Solution & Innovation Experience team. “In comparison, the original system from our partner Krones can fill 50,000 bottles, but that would be much too loud here at the trade fair booth.”
The showcase demonstrated how the cloud-based SAP Digital Manufacturing solution could serve as the process order management system for SAP customers, whether they typically work with a lot size of one or with continuous manufacturing at higher speeds. The purchase order could have come from an SAP S/4HANA system, for instance, and ended here with execution in production. “We can see the hardware integration with our own eyes,” said Hughes.
AI was also involved: a camera captured the fill level of each bottle. If it was outside the defined tolerance, the bottle was rejected and this information was sent to the SAP system. A manufacturer could use this data to calculate the production costs for the system and the profitability of every work center, all with AI support. The data from all systems would give experts and management insights into how well the production process was working. This, in turn, would help improve planning.
