Follow by the announcement of the partnership of Smart Manufacturing between SAP and NEXCOM on April 25th, 2019, NEXCOM today revealed plans for solutions to facilitate the smart manufacturing for the SAP customers.
(SAP joins NEXCOM: Realizing the Vision of Smart Manufacturing.
Left: Tony Chen, SAP Global VP; right: Clement Lin, NEXCOM CEO.)
Clement Lin, the NEXCOM CEO, said “NEXCOM has been collaborating with SAP for two years. Our partnership enhances the Edge of computing with SAP solutions to bridge Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). Today we have achieved the seamless alignment between the smart factory and SAP Edge Service, or the HANA cloud. In short, it’s the perfect integration of IT by SAP and OT by NEXCOM.”
The Operational Technology is complex and diverse, to the IT players, such as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, and Network Security. Some of the OT domain knowledge are beyond their understanding and expertise.
The collaboration between the OT and IT is a powerful duet, particularly the various real-time big data from the OT side has an impact on all the applications on the IT side. Customers often question if the historical data and cost allocation-based ERP can meet the future Industry 4.0 needs and are asking for real-time based ERP for business decisions. The OT now can offer the enterprises the Real-time ERP, Predictable ERP, AI-oriented ERP, even the Self-improving ERP. “The enterprise is facing new challenges and new opportunities. Whoever gets the powerful tools out of the IT/OT convergence will win over this competition” said Lin.
NEXCOM has developed the smart factory and presented the entire digital factory in its enterprise war room on the Edge server and onto the HANA cloud. The IT and OT became perfectly integrated with the SAP Edge Service On-premise Edition plus the NEXCOM “one-click to Edge” and “one-click to HANA” portals. All of the SAP applications can fully utilize any real-time big data from the smart factory directly from the Edge server or the HANA cloud. All the information in the enterprise war room of the smart factory can be presented, monitored, and analyzed in HANA. “Thus, we’ve enabled the smart manufacturing for any SAP applications with just one simple click to HANA!” said Lin.
NEXCOM made it possible for the Edge servers to SAP pre-load applications on different servers, such as connecting robots for asset management, predictive maintenance, environment/facility management, device security, etc. “We are building more solution modules for the smart factory, all of the modules will converge to the Edge servers for SAP Edge computing, or forwarded to HANA for cloud applications,” said Joe Lin, the president of NexAIOT, the NEXCOM subsidiary dedicated to Industry 4.0 solutions.
By adopting the EtherCAT standard, NEXCOM has created a huge compatible machinery industry including the robots, CNC machines, and all general motion machines. NEXCOM not only enabled the E2E and M2M for the entire Industrial IoT architecture but also connected most of the major non-standard protocols. All these accomplishments have helped NEXCOM pave the road for more comprehensive Industry 4.0 solutions in smart manufacturing. “We position NEXCOM as the OT champion. When the OT champion meets with the IT champion, SAP, we actualized the vision of smart manufacturing and smart ERP with a self-improving mechanism. All contribute to the Smart Enterprise!” said Clement Lin.