Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
While attending the SAP Best Practices for Oil and Gas conference in Houston, I had the opportunity to meet with Matthew Easlea who heads up SAP’s upcoming Asset Intelligence Network (AIN) offering. AIN will be a collaboration platform allowing manufacturers, end users, service suppliers, and others to securely share information and communicate concerning manufacturing assets. AIN also allows users to incorporate data from existing SAP applications, like PDMS, as well. The vision is very similar to possible use cases that ARC has put forth showing the promise of IIoT.
The way SAP envisions the use of AIN requires participation and trust by both manufacturers and end users. Manufacturers create the ‘digital twin’ or a data model for their product. This product could be rotating equipment like a pump or turbine, or could be large earthmoving equipment, or a skid processing unit, or any manufactured asset that is of interest. This digital twin will serve as the template for contextualizing data pertinent to that piece of equipment and will allow the manufacturer to distribute product notifications, manuals, specifications, etc. to subscribers like end users, service suppliers, and OEMs. End users can share their use data with manufacturers through a subscription to the same data model.
This collaborative environment promises a win-win scenario for all parties. The end user benefits with the latest information about the equipment distributed to the correct parties in the organization, better product enhancements based on the community’s experience, maintenance notifications based on real-time operations, improved spare management, etc. The manufacturer would receive benefits such as improved market data, improved use case data, the enablement of equipment as a service, performance analysis, virtual audits, etc.
SAP published a video describing its vision for AIN in 2014. The company expects to release the platform by the end of 2015.
The way SAP envisions the use of AIN requires participation and trust by both manufacturers and end users. Manufacturers create the ‘digital twin’ or a data model for their product. This product could be rotating equipment like a pump or turbine, or could be large earthmoving equipment, or a skid processing unit, or any manufactured asset that is of interest. This digital twin will serve as the template for contextualizing data pertinent to that piece of equipment and will allow the manufacturer to distribute product notifications, manuals, specifications, etc. to subscribers like end users, service suppliers, and OEMs. End users can share their use data with manufacturers through a subscription to the same data model.
This collaborative environment promises a win-win scenario for all parties. The end user benefits with the latest information about the equipment distributed to the correct parties in the organization, better product enhancements based on the community’s experience, maintenance notifications based on real-time operations, improved spare management, etc. The manufacturer would receive benefits such as improved market data, improved use case data, the enablement of equipment as a service, performance analysis, virtual audits, etc.
SAP published a video describing its vision for AIN in 2014. The company expects to release the platform by the end of 2015.