OREANDA-NEWS. March 22, 2016. As announced by Bosch at Bosch ConnectedWorld 2016 in Berlin, SAP is working with the company and other international partners to combine the technical standards of Germany’s “Platfform Industrie 4.0” and the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).

The combination of the two approaches allows SAP applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect with intelligence at the edge and allows exchange of data between IoT application services and edge devises, like sensors.

Standardization Enables Customers to Adopt SAP Software in Heterogeneous Environments

As a leading solution provider for the Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0, we rely heavily on standards to connect sensors, machines, moving asset and facilities in a heterogeneous environment. This is why we are actively engaged in various standardization and pre-standardization organizations and with organizations like the IIC, the Plattform Industrie 4.0, the OPC and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

For instance, integration standards that permeate all layers of the Industrial Internet stack are necessary to integrate devices, platforms and business applications in an efficient way. At the same time, different partners in the ecosystem need to agree on certain interoperability standards to allow interaction among various assets and ensure a high level of security and trust, which is crucial in the IoT.

So we are very excited to be a front runner in IoT technology working with Bosch on a “testbed,” a controlled experimentation environment or reference implementation. A testbed takes a strong partnership with the other players, it cannot be done by one company alone.

The other partners in the testbed are Dassault Systemes of France and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of India.  TCS is doing the data acquisition while Bosch provides energy components and is continuously collecting data from all the machinery in the plant, generating a stream of information about the electricity consumed in the process of manufacturing. Dassault 3D Experience Platform brings a multidimensional representation of all the plant’s machinery and functions. SAP provides a powerful platform and database for predictive analytics and Big Data.

With standard products like SAP Plant Connectivity and the SAP Manufacturing Execution Suite, SAP can integrate and coordinate manufacturing data. IoT applications can predict what will happen in production and perform process execution accordingly. SAP Energy Monitoring & Analytics aggregates data across meters and provides analysis of what is going on in the plant. With this information, energy consumption can be optimized. The combination of both can optimize the overall production and energy consumption in manufacturing, which leads to lower energy consumption and lower cost by keeping the promised delivery dates of the customer products.

Cutting Electricity Costs with Optimized Production Planning

In Bosch’s plant, a number of connectivity solutions are now combined to manage and optimize hydraulic valve manufacturing in order to avoid consuming electricity at particularly expensive peak times. If all the energy-intensive machinery in Bosch’s plant runs at the same time, this can lead to very high electricity consumption at peak times. The resulting increase in electricity costs pushes up the cost of manufacturing the hydraulic valves.

By using software to manage production and electricity consumption as effectively as possible, energy demand can be optimized and peak loads reduced by up to 10 percent. This reduces manufacturing costs and increases competitiveness, while protecting the environment at the same time.

This testbed will run from design to close, which could be up to two years and will give both companies an opportunity to identify potential issues and gain great experience in a controlled lab environment.