This SAP industry center uses artificial intelligence to streamline production

When Hurricane Helene damaged western North Carolina in September and filled medical facilities with people who couldn’t be cared for at home, Jim Polk, a technical director at Exela Pharmaceutical Sciences in Lenoir, North Carolina, got a call from the hospital group Atrium Health. in flooded Asheville. Could his company make intravenous saline bags for the expected number of patients?

“That could take six months,” Polk thought, as he mentally went through the familiar steps: meeting government and hospital requirements, hiring, lining up machines and suppliers, writing and sharing of reports, and weeks of trial and error in the factory to get production right. .

But Exela had upgraded its manufacturing technology – and not just on the shop floor of the 600-employee factory in Lenoir. Exela also had installed new software to connect factory production data with material purchasing, labor supply, government compliance, market demand, shipping, pricing and other functions, using artificial intelligence applications to automatically detect and resolve problems.

This use of self-improving AI software to quickly increase efficiency was called a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in a widely read 2011 book by Swiss engineer Klaus Schwab. He predicted that AI-enabled manufacturing would transform factories as profoundly as previous technologies in steam power, mass production and computer control. The Helene crisis gave Exela the opportunity to test these “Industry 4.0” software applications on a new product line.

In less than three weeks, Exela produced infusion bags ready for shipment.

“It was beyond miraculous,” Polk said. “We now bring forward a line without adding headings. We don’t have to create, copy and save all those documents. We save many weeks. We can rock ‘n’ roll straight away.”

Polk and his colleague Don Overton, Exela’s head of finance, had seen demonstrations of what their new software could do: design, mix, bottle and ship chemicals, drugs and soft drinks, among other sample products, while providing a few pointers. and saw the machines start.

They saw how this could work during a late summer visit to the Industry 4.0 Center, a model factory complex at SAP, Exela’s main business software supplier, at its glass-walled U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

“It’s the future of manufacturing: purely digital, completely paperless,” and highly automated, Overton said. “It’s integrated seamlessly and in real time: accounts payable is directly linked to purchasing, which is directly linked to warehousing, which is directly linked to manufacturing, which is directly linked to shipping, and which is linked to sales and to HR.

“So when we moved the product, there’s no delay. There’s no paper to reconcile. Records don’t pile up. We call it Bye Bye Paper.”

The typical cost for SAP’s digital manufacturing execution system includes an annual subscription fee of about $100,000, but also an expenditure of at least $300,000 on new hardware to run it. According to a study by International Data Corp. from June 2024, users could expect a 10% productivity savings, plus a tripling of their profitability in three years, IDC added.

SAP’s “copilot” AI application, Joule, answers questions from users within a manufacturer’s network. When asked about sources for popular materials, Joule will list prices, shipping times, reliability, labor and political factors and other variables for suppliers around the world, with results varying by producer and customer needs and locations.

Germany-based SAP employs approximately 3,000 employees at its U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square. The company also has Industry 4.0 centers in a handful of other locations in the US, Europe and Asia.

But with its location in suburban Philadelphia, near the center of the northeastern United States, the Newtown Square center expanded from a smaller facility last year. It is now about 800 square feet, about the size of a Super Wawa.

“I love that center. We hosted customers, IT and business stakeholders there to explore supply chains (how to accelerate them) and make continuous improvements,” said Asif Poonja, CEO of Fujitsu Americas, in a telephone interview from his office in Toronto. .

Once a Japanese manufacturer best known for its films and cameras, Fujitsu is now a global manufacturing consultant for companies like ABB, the Swedish maker of generators and electrical equipment. Fujitsu has brought engineers and managers from ABB and other global companies to Newtown Square to demonstrate the impact of AI on factory automation and business processes.

The center, with its design and control centers, factory robots and bottling and filling machines, makes the use of software more tangible: “Sitting on a Zoom call or on a laptop is not always effective” in engaging factory professionals, Poonja said. “It is very powerful to see these solutions in action on actual machines that design, produce and package chemicals, medicines or beverages.”

Poonja says the new generation of manufacturing software also means employees can be hired and trained faster.

“It’s difficult to get into factories these days. At Newtown Square you can go straight to their (working model) factory floors and have conversations with their engineers. It’s amazing the details you can get into,” Poonja added.

Will software replace us all?

SAP employs 112,000 employees worldwide. SAP’s shares have risen twice as fast as rival Oracle over the past five years, and also beat their US-based rival in the past one- and two-year periods.

Is all this automation destroying jobs? Exela said it is hiring while automating production as overall sales have increased.

But automation has had a clear impact on next-generation factories. For example, GSK, the pharmaceutical giant that once used thousands of stamping pills at locations in the Philadelphia area, plans to invest up to $800 million (including $21 million in state funds) in a factory near the Susquehanna in Marietta, Pennsylvania, which will modest 200 jobs.

SAP’s multinational workshop

SAP’s Industry 4.0 Center includes machines from a constellation of companies, many of which are based in SAP’s home country.

There are mixing machines from Beckoff, a real-time location system from Kinexon, a storage and retrieval system from Gebhardt and rapid inspection machines from Krones, all based in Germany.

There are portable and portable scanners from Illinois-based Zebra. Robot carriers from a Danish company, Universal Robot, are mounted with cameras from Germany-based Asentics; Mobile Industrial Robots from MiR, another Danish company; and a “hands-free” maintenance system that uses TeamViewer software from Frontline of Germany and Navigator headsets from RealWare of Washington state.

“With all the changes going on in the supply chain, all the disruptions” in recent years from COVID shutdowns, attacks on Red Sea shipping and dock worker strikes, “we wanted a facility where we could showcase our solutions and show how these applications work together to solve problems – instead of making people use a lot of Power Points,” said Darcy MacClaren, SAP’s Chief Revenue Officer for the digital supply chain, during a visit to the center.

While SAP competes with other major software makers, it also leverages and integrates with products from rivals such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and many others.

“North America is the most competitive part of the world” for business software makers, Lloyd Adams, head of SAP Americas, said in an interview. “We’re bringing more of our customers to the 4.0 center, it’s a magnet for organizations across North America. It really helps crystallize what’s possible.”

In the center, SAP Vice President Rakesh Gandhi demonstrated how employees who remain on the factory floor wear cameras and sensors that feed data into enterprise software systems that adjust machinery, purchasing and pricing. “We automate all steps,” he added. “Our big message is the importance of collecting all this information so that you can seamlessly embed it into the AI ​​and understand what is happening in your supply chain in real time.

“The customer wants everything to run from one control center. It is important to visualize how all the technology will work. The operator on the shop floor can see all the analyses,” such as whether a flood in China, a strike in Britain or a closing ports in California will make it more efficient to replace one supplier with another. “They will be data-driven companies.”

2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.