Customers for high-end cars have a clear vision of what they want and expect manufacturers to keep up. Smart Press Shop, a joint venture of Porsche and Schuler, uses cloud solutions from SAP as the foundation for its Industry 4.0 initiative to build intelligent automotive manufacturing. This makes it as agile and responsive as the cars that are built.
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With SAP technology, we’re reinventing production with Industry 4.0, increasing resilience of our supply chain, and making automotive component manufacturing smarter.
Smart Press Shop was determined to set a new milestone in automotive production by establishing a greenfield plant that showcases the art of the possible for automotive component manufacturing. The objectives for the new facility, located between Halle and Leipzig in Germany, were to enable fully paperless production and a completely automated process for configuring production line machinery to press automotive body parts – enabling the company to deliver small-batch orders cost-effectively. “Imagine a system automatically making order confirmations based on machine integration instead of manual confirmations,” said Böhm, Project Manager, Smart Press Shop GmbH & Co. KG. “This can help streamline production processes and enable a faster inspection and releasing process.”
To turn this vision into reality, Smart Press Shop needed a cloud-first development strategy for building core ERP and manufacturing execution systems (MES) to digitalize production from start to finish – and run entirely in the cloud using 100% green energy.
Our goal is to ensure paperless production through a fully autonomous setup process of press tool provisioning, allowing the most competitive production of small batches. Every process is planned and reported back from the shop floor to the top floor in the cloud, which gives us full, real-time transparency into costs, progress status, machine availability, and material consumption. A real digital twin of the factory.
As one of the first organizations to implement the SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud solution for execution together with SAP S/4HANA Cloud worldwide, Smart Press Shop is harnessing Industry 4.0 technologies to integrate forming metal or alloy sheets and laser cutting equipment at its new factory with its cloud-based manufacturing execution system (MES).
The cloud-first development strategy includes vertical and horizontal integration as well as networking. Every business process maps to the IT platform, where it operates using centralized core functions, such as the workflow system and the document management system. All relevant KPIs appear exactly where they are needed in real time. The detailed, continuous component tracking represents a new milestone in automotive production, enabling AI techniques and detailed cross-process data analysis.
“We were looking for a modern cloud solution for our IT. SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud convinced us in the end with its modern cloud architecture and user interface,” said Hendrik Rothe, managing director of Smart Press Shop GmbH & Co. KG.
Find out how Smart Press Shop is building a better way to serve the automotive industry by using cloud solutions from SAP for completely paperless and fully digital production of auto body parts.
The ability to configure the production line for new products quickly and without manual intervention means that Smart Press Shop can manufacture small batches of components much more efficiently than a traditional production plant. In the automotive industry, where just-in-time manufacturing is a key requirement, this gives Smart Press Shop a significant competitive advantage.
We are very happy to have a single source of supply for the various cloud solutions from SAP in a SaaS model, with Syntax also taking care of the subsequent application management.
Smart Press Shop, a joint venture of Porsche and Schuler, has a body parts production facility in Halle (Saale), Germany, to assist automotive manufacturers with the production of outer skin parts in aluminum or steel as well as the production of small batches.
| Industry | Company Size | Partner |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive | Small to medium | Syntax |
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