SAP’s Vision Of The Intelligent Enterprise

SAP has caught the AI frenzy. Artificial intelligence is supposed to make everything better. There’s nothing definitive yet, but machine and deep learning are supposed to optimize many SAP processes and make SAP’s vision of the intelligent enterprise become reality.

Our company is interested in AI as well, which is why we have already developed some prototypes together with Siemens. And they definitely have potential!

The company Trumpf also debuted a fascinating solution. A normal smartphone microphone records the sounds of machines to determine in subsequent analysis if they might need to be repaired soon.

Trumpf employees based their solution on recordings from service staff and a machine learning algorithm from a major cloud provider – for anyone wondering: it wasn’t SAP, naturally.

There’s a simple reason for that. SAP wants to make money with AI, but if you look at its competitors in the field, like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, you’ll see that they all invest more money and time in AI projects – and already began research years ago.

Becoming an intelligent enterprise – but without SAP

SAP has no strategy for catching up with its competitors in AI – quite on the contrary, actually. Its AI solutions are far from being as comprehensive as the products of Daimler, Siemens or Bosch. Even our company invests more in artificial intelligence and has more use cases than SAP does.

This is one of the reasons why Trumpf used its own cloud system for its intelligent maintenance solution. There are acoustic interfaces transferring machine data into the cloud, but no physical connection to the machines. This means that service data and machine data is strictly separated, which is advantageous for customers – that’s digital transformation!

SAP has a vision: the intelligent enterprise. What it lacks, however, are sustainable ideas and technological know-how.

If SAP would still behave like it did in R/2 or R/3 times – collaborating with the SAP community, treating customers as equals – I wouldn’t even be concerned. But as things are now, SAP might have to kiss its vision of intelligent enterprises goodbye.