Schneider Electric and SAP collaborate on industrial digitalisation

Schneider Electric and SAP have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to collaborate on IT/OT integration applications. They plan to explore opportunities to enhance industry innovation and digital transformation, drive open standards and foster close integration of IT and OT technology.

The companies intend to validate scenarios with their complementary offerings to help provide easy and seamless integration for joint industrial customers. They also plan to address future collaboration in the areas of sustainability and energy management.

“Our collaboration with Schneider Electric demonstrates SAP’s wider support for the Industry 4.0 ecosystem,” said Peter Maier, president for industries and customer advisory at SAP. “Our companies align on the importance of collaboration, innovation, and open standards, making integrated information and operational technology solutions easy to consume for our joint customers.” 

The companies plan to explore opportunities to deliver value to customers through preconfigured and tested end-to-end solutions to lower cost of implementation and operation of mission-critical business processes. The first scenarios will be:

• Simplified shopfloor OT/IT integration based on common standards, onboarding, and lifecycle management of assets as digital twins.
• End-to-end closed-loop, intelligent asset and field service management using virtual and augmented reality technologies.

“Many of our customers are looking for easier ways to integrate advanced technology in their digitalisation journey,” said Bruno Zerbib, EVP and chief platform and technology officer at Schneider Electric. “With SAP, we’re committed to addressing market challenges with innovative digital solutions to help these customers leverage the benefits of Industry 4.0. For example, ensuring end-to-end OT/IT connectivity enables data-driven decision making and improved performance strategies.

“Solutions that automatically trigger maintenance or service orders in SAP’s applications can close the loop between maintenance strategy and execution for optimal asset maintenance. And augmented reality can give users the right information at the right time, and in the right place, to reduce the time and increase the accuracy of root cause analysis.”