Chemical company BASF and software company SAP have announced the start of a project that will help businesses to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Industry 4.0.
Based at BASF’s Ludwigshafen site in Germany, the project will explore digital collaboration among business partners in engineering and maintenance.
The initiative is in response to the emergence of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), which relate to the way technology talks to each other.
As previously reported in the Chemical Industry Journal, Industry 4.0 is transforming the way chemical companies run their operations.
At Industry 4.0’s heart is a growing realisation that huge amounts of time and effort are being wasted because too many production and back-office systems are not connected.
That disconnect means that skilled personnel ranging from manufacturing teams to sales staff find themselves repeating the same tasks when, if managed properly, their IT could do it in a fraction of the time.
SAP’s Asset Intelligence Network, a cloud-based collaborative network, will provide BASF with a digital connection to equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and service providers.
The companies say that the project’s goal is to establish a fully integrated and centrally managed repository for information, helping to ensure readily available and reliable data.
BASF says that, by establishing a single source for information, it aims to further improve the efficiency of its engineering and maintenance processes.
Andreas Wernsdörfer, Senior Vice President Technical Site Services Ludwigshafen, BASF, said: “BASF constantly works on optimising its sites, plants and production processes.
“SAP Asset Intelligence Network is an approach that has the potential to further improve our engineering and maintenance processes by establishing a fully integrated digital information chain between OEMs, service providers and BASF over the whole asset lifecycle.
“A more integrated digital approach with our business partners would allow us to easily access the latest and current information when and where needed, leading to quicker and better decision-making and, in consequence, higher asset effectiveness.”
Dr Tanja Rueckert, President IoT and Digital Supply Chain, SAP, said: “With SAP Asset Intelligence Network, we enable our customers to collaborate in a digital ecosystem to manage intelligent devices in the Internet of Things and achieve their goals for operational excellence,”
“Working with industry leaders like BASF, we aim to establish a network of real-time industrial asset information so that our customers and their partners can realize the full advantages of the IoT.”
The evaluation project is expected to run for several months.
As the market leader in enterprise application software, SAP helps companies of all sizes and industries improve operations in everything from back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device.
