SAP Industry Center uses this AI to

When Hurricane Helen devastated western North Carolina in September, filling medical facilities with people who could not be cared for at home, Jim Polk, chief technology officer of Exela Pharmaceutical Sciences in Lenoir, North Carolina, received a phone call from a hospital group Atrium Health. In flooded Asheville. Can his company make IV saline bags to crush expected patients?

“This could take six months,” Polk thought, reviewing in his mind the familiar steps of meeting government and hospital requirements, hiring, arranging machines and suppliers, writing and sharing reports, and weeks of trial and error in the factory to get to the right production. .

But Excela has modernized its manufacturing technology — and not just on the floor of its 600-person factory in Lenoir. Exela also installed new software to connect factory production data to material sourcing, labor supply, government compliance, market demand, shipping, pricing and other functions, using artificial intelligence applications to automatically identify and fix problems.

This use of self-improving AI programs to rapidly boost efficiency was called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in a widely read 2011 book by Swiss engineer Klaus Schwab. He expects AI-enhanced manufacturing to completely transform factories like previous steam power, mass production, and computer control technologies. The Helene crisis gave Exela the opportunity to test “Industry 4.0” software applications on a new production line.

In less than three weeks, Exela was producing IV bags ready to ship.

“It was beyond miraculous,” Polk said. “We bring up a line now without adding headers. We don’t have to create, copy and maintain all these documents. We save several weeks. We can swing right away.”

Polk and his colleague Don Overton, Excela’s chief financial officer, watched demonstrations of what their new software could do — design, mix, package and ship chemicals, drugs and soft drinks, among other product models, provided some guidance, and watched the machines go live.

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

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

“So when we moved the product, there was no delay. There’s no paper to reconcile. The records don’t pile up. We call it paper bye bye.”

The typical cost of an SAP digital manufacturing execution system includes an annual subscription fee of about $100,000 — but also spending at least $300,000 on new hardware to run it. IDC added that according to a June 2024 study by International Data Corp, users can expect a 10% productivity savings – as well as tripling their profitability over three years.

SAP’s AI “copilot” app, Joule, receives questions from users across the manufacturer’s network. When asked about sourcing common materials, Juul will list prices, shipping times, reliability, labor, political factors, and other variables for suppliers around the world, with varying results depending on product needs, customers, and locations.

SAP, based in Germany, employs about 3,000 people at its U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square. The company also has Industry 4.0 centers in a few other locations in the US, Europe and Asia.

But with its location in the Philadelphia suburbs near the center of the Northeastern United States, the Newtown Square center expanded last year from a smaller facility. It’s now about 8,000 square feet, about the size of a Super Wawa.

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

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

The center, with its design and control centres, factory robots, and filling and packaging machines, makes using the software more real: “Sitting on a Zoom call or on a laptop is not always effective” in engaging factory professionals, Bonga said. “Seeing these solutions in action” on the actual machines that design, produce and package chemicals, drugs or beverages “is very powerful.”

New generation manufacturing software also helps hire and train workers faster, Bonga says.

“It’s hard to get to factories these days. In Newtown Square, you can go straight to the factories [working model] factory floors and have discussions with their engineers. “It’s amazing the detail you can go into,” Bonga added.

Will software replace us all?

SAP employs 112,000 people worldwide. SAP shares have risen twice as fast as rival Oracle over the past five years, and have outperformed its US rival over the past one and two years.

Is all this automation destroying jobs? Exela said it is hiring even as production is automated, because overall sales are up.

But automation has had a noticeable impact on next-generation factories. For example, GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant that once used thousands of stamp pills at Philadelphia-area sites, plans to invest up to $800 million (including $21 million in state funds) in a plant near the Susquehanna. in Marietta, Pennsylvania, targeting a large commercial project. A modest 200 job opportunities.

SAP Multinational Workshop

SAP’s Industry 4.0 hub includes devices from a range of companies, many of which are located in SAP’s home country.

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

There are portable and wearable scanners from Illinois-based Zebra. There are robotic transporters from a Danish company, Universal Robot, equipped with cameras from Germany-based Asentics; Mobile industrial robots from MiR, another Danish company; and a “hands-free” maintenance system using TeamViewer software from Germany-based Frontline and Navigator headsets from Washington State-based RealWare.

“With all the changes happening in the supply chain, and all the disruptions” in recent years due to coronavirus lockdowns, attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and port worker strikes, “we wanted a facility where we could highlight our solutions and show how these applications work,” he said. “We work together to solve problems – rather than making people use lots of Power Points,” said Darcy McLaren, chief revenue officer for digital supply chain at SAP, during a visit to the centre.

Although SAP competes with other major software manufacturers, it also uses and integrates with products made by competitors including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and many others.

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

At the center, SAP Vice President Rakesh Gandhi explained how employees who remain at the factory wear cameras and sensors that feed data into the company’s software systems that adjust machines, purchasing and pricing. “We are automating all the steps,” he added. “Our big message is the importance of collecting all this information so you can seamlessly integrate it with AI and understand what is happening in your supply chain in real time.

“The customer wants everything to be run from one control center. It’s important to visualize how all the technology works. The store operator can see all the analytics,” such as whether a flood in China, a strike in Britain, or a port closure in California will lead to increased Efficiency of replacing one resource with another. “They have become data-driven companies.”

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