Easy as ABC: three industry specialists spill the beans on Smart Manufacturing

Land, sea and sky manufacturing

Aerospace and defense manufacturing systems is labor intensive. On the one hand there’s production engineering, which requires tightly controlled configuration, and on the other there’s the shop floor which must adapt and manage change to continuously improve.

Extending from the oceans to space – through offerings as diverse as ships, industrial turbines, motorcycles and satellites – the need for this customer to establish a seamless flow of information between design and manufacturing via a single solution was critical.

It was clear that activities across the entire workforce needed to be digitized. So, in partnership with Fujitsu, the deployment of the SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution took place to create strong process integration.

The results saw enhanced collaboration across departments enabling new insight, reduced IT hardware maintenance costs and new products brought to market faster.

Not only did establishing a better link between production engineering and the shop floor boost productivity, it future-proofed operations to enable the company to react swiftly to any upcoming change with a foundation of digitally connected people across divers functional groups.

Beer production & 21st century blockchain technology

This customer wanted to give customers full transparency and traceability of its supply chain of barley – from the farm to the bottle in a consumer’s hand.

The world leading brewer was faced with a challenge to produce a data set and platform that would deliver a decentralized, immutable and real-time environment. And success rested on the trustworthiness of the data and its secure storage ensured by blockchain technology as a ledger of transactions to guarantee authenticity.

Here, a multidisciplinary approach was vital as the project involved integrating blockchain with the company’s existing SAP and supply chain management systems. Specialist knowledge was required, so Fujitsu stepped up to the plate to work in collaboration and deploy its Track and Trust Solution Center.

The success saw a milestone achieved for the customer’s sustainability goals by supporting the traceability of the indirect supply chain. It also helped to directly support its farmers producing barley with the introduction of smart agriculture to use new technology, data and insights to improve their use of natural resources, crop yields and livelihoods.

An energy sector built on data

In order to create cleaner, smarter energy, South Australia’s high voltage transmission network set about to provide secure, reliable and stable power.

Faced with an ageing SAP BW 7.4 platform that lacked data visibility and speed, this customer wanted drive efficiencies and innovation with better access to its operational data. But to upgrade to SAP BW/4HAHA, the company needed to find the right technology partner to deliver seamless migration.

In partnership with Fujitsu and SAP, the customer chose to perform a first-of-its kind remote conversion – creating parallel environments and migrating only the requisite data models, reports and associated objects.

Data tasks that once took minutes were cut down to seconds, and query request became 73% faster. Not only did the organization’s data footprint decrease, data accessibility for all employees boosted the speed and efficiency to report like never before.