Innovation is the fundamental strategy for growth. To drive new levels of performance, you need to integrate innovation with closed-loop support across all stages – and within the context – of value-chain capabilities and strategic objectives.

Through business insight and business process integration, you can connect key functions including planning, innovation management, complex project execution, and product portfolio management – to leverage innovation as a sustainable and profitable competitive advantage.

SAP solutions support the following processes related to innovation management:

• Strategy and planning – Developing faster responsiveness to new market and customer opportunities requires comprehensive business intelligence and aggregation of relevant knowledge. These include product performance analytics, project pipeline, operational metrics, competitive information, market trends, and customer analysis. SAP solutions provide a rich set of business intelligence and analytic tools to support collaborative approaches to proactively identify strategic road map and innovation opportunities.
• Managing innovative ideas – Leveraging the right talent, partners, and capabilities required to enhance your company's core innovation competencies requires tools to support the critical front-end of the product and service development process. The SAP Business Suite supports smart idea management and integrated concept development to help you capitalize on the best ideas and translate them into successful, innovative products.
• Program and project management – Define and coordinate resources and projects cross-functionally to enable launching at the right time to maximize profitability.
• Portfolio management – Align your portfolios with corporate objectives, including portfolios of projects, programs, and services within R&D, professional services, and IT. Maximize the value, balance, and strategic alignment of your portfolio of projects with the SAP Portfolio and Project Management application.

SAP Business Suite solutions help you stay competitive by supporting integrated product development processes that align product definition and production ramp-up – and reduce your time to profit so you can address these key challenges:

• Respond to margin pressure by adding new products to the marketplace
• Design for profit and avoiding costly reengineering and remake
• Accelerate development and ramp-up time
• Optimize sourcing potential and facilitating supplier integration

Integrated product development helps you support the whole product development process – from collaborative product development, component and task sourcing, to ramp-up to production.

Collaborative Development

Gain need full visibility and control over product data and documents, engineering changes, and cost. In collaboration with your development ecosystem, SAP partners help connect authoring tools with SAP software's flexible product structure management – together reducing development time. These SAP solutions support:

• Product structure management and variant configuration
• Material master management and document management
• Development collaboration
• Product costing
• Quality engineering
• Engineering change management
• Manufacturing collaboration
• Complaints and returns analysis

Sharing Product Data for Component and Task Sourcing

Early visibility of required materials and components enable cost savings through an increased sourcing window, demand bundling, and fewer parts needed across the development portfolio. SAP solutions support the following processes related to component and task sourcing:

• Supplier identification and on-boarding
• Collaborative bidding and purchase-order management
• Spare parts management

Synchronizing Design with Manufacturing

SAP solutions can help you avoid quality and scale issues by helping to ensure seamless processes, a common material master, and aligned development and manufacturing bills of material. They support these manufacturing integration processes:

• Prototyping and manufacturing ramp-up
• Quality control
• Quality improvement
• Handover to manufacturing and service
• Service ramp-up
• Manufacturing process planning

Manufacturers with a clean cross-functional process to help ensure product compliance will be able to cut a workable path through the web of global regulations for environmental and consumer safety. SAP Business Suite solutions help you embed compliance controls across purchasing, development, manufacturing, sales, distribution, servicing, and recycling – to minimize your risk and protect your brand.

With SAP solutions, you can protect your revenue and brand, while driving beyond compliance towards differentiation and sustainability by:

• Making environment, health, and safety an integral part of the development process to ensure compliant specifications
• Recognizing and evaluating risks associated with regulatory requirements
• Embedding compliance controls in supply chain, quality management, and manufacturing to minimize product compliance risks
• Implementing compliance checks in sales, distribution, servicing, and recycling administration to maintain life-cycle compliance beyond manufacturing

Develop Compliant Products

Ensure that all design decisions take material-related compliance information into account. Design specifications must identify applicable industry standards and government regulations, along with any customer-specific compliance requirements, before engineers begin design and prototyping activities.

Manufacture Compliant Products

• Supply chain collaboration – Communicate easily and quickly with suppliers and customers on compliance-related issues.
• Material management – Monitor quantities for individual substances across organizations to detect overages.
• Movement tracking – Make sure materials are handled in accordance with safety regulations, from receipt through manufacturing to shipping.
• Sales optimization – Design product configurations for compliance in attractive new markets.

Maintain Product Compliance

With efficient reporting, you can maintain thorough audit information ready at the click of a mouse for regulatory authorities and customers