The Roadmap to the Digital Thread Across The Product Lifecycle

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Siloes between engineering and business have existed in enterprises for decades. As manufacturers design and deliver smarter products and assets, access to real-time business information across networks is critical to bring new and improved innovations to market faster.

In July 2020, SAP and Siemens announced a strategic partnership to deliver a digital thread that bridges engineering, manufacturing, and business. By teaming up, we are putting our customers on a faster path to bringing together the best of our leading PLM and ERP platforms. Our goal is to help customers to break down siloes so product design teams, manufacturers, and service managers have the information they need to quickly create and manage customer-centric product and service offerings.

Now, after close collaboration and teamwork, we are in a position to share more details about our joint roadmap for the integration of SAP S/4HANA and Siemens’ Teamcenter® software. This integration builds upon best practices across system and line of business boundaries, to result in a new integrated solution that blends engineering, manufacturing, and business. It comes with unique differentiating capabilities that will allow organizations to accelerate time to market - without worrying about the complexity of integration - and reducing total cost of ownership. 

We will be delivering the integration in three phases through the end of 2022, with additional phases planned beyond this time to address new digital threads.

Phase I (October 2021) focuses on product engineering fundamentals, establishing a framework of core business scenarios on a shared domain model that will underpin end-to-end business processes. This enables enhanced traceability, federation, and linkages across the Siemens and SAP system boundaries. 

Phase II (Spring 2022) aims to shorten time to market by providing optimized integration between product engineering, extended supply chain, and manufacturing operations, and delivers the foundation for advanced capabilities such as variant rules and schema, project and portfolio management, and integration to manufacturing.

Phase III (Fall 2022) will focus on bi-directional traceability and closed loop collaboration between manufacturing engineering and production engineering covering use cases such as cross-system impact analysis, change initiation, and process execution.

This roadmap provides clear direction to our valued Siemens and SAP customers to help them manage increasingly complex and configurable products and meet the challenge of an ever-increasing rate of innovation. Our collaboration will help our customers accelerate their digital transformation by more closely connecting our industry-leading solutions. This end-to-end solution aims to allow teams across the business network to efficiently work together to design and deliver innovative products productively, profitably, and sustainably. 

This collaboration affirms both companies’ commitment to working together to deliver innovations to meet the needs of our joint customers today and in the future. This combined integration solution will be developed and provided by SAP and Siemens, it will be made available to customers of both companies.

Our teams could not be more excited about the opportunities that we are creating for our customers to grow their businesses.