Mark Landrosh: 0:03

So it's this reimagining of the products of the innovation process that Enterprise Product Development really allows our customers to do.

Tom Raftery: 0:15

Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening. Where ever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply chain podcast. The number one podcast focussing on the digitisation of Supply chain. And I'm your host, Global vice president of SAP. Tom Raftery. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Digital Supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today. I have Mark. Mark, would you like to introduce yourself?

Mark Landrosh: 0:42

Great. Thank you, Tom. My name is Mark Landrosh and I am part of our solution management group here at SAP, and I focus primarily on our discrete PLM solution offerings.

Tom Raftery: 0:54

OK, for people who are not familiar, PLM stands for?

Mark Landrosh: 0:58

Product Lifecycle Management.

Tom Raftery: 1:00

OK. And what's that?

Mark Landrosh: 1:02

Product Lifecycle Management focuses on the entire lifecycle of our customers products from ideation through the detailed design work to the hand over the manufacturing, the execution of production, out through service and support. And, you know, through decommissioning and obsolescence.

Tom Raftery: 1:26

OK. And you're coming on the show today to talk about a new product offering that we have called Enterprise Product Development. If I if I remember correctly, am I right? Number one. And number two, what is it?

Mark Landrosh: 1:40

Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're correct. It's a SAP Enterprise Product Development. It is a cloud based solution that we've recently launched into the market. What we're doing is we're taking several different capabilities that we've developed and we're putting them together within our cloud offering. It will cover things from requirements management to visualisation to collaboration, connected products, systems modelling and so forth. It's a new solution that we think that our customers will be very, very interested in and we'll be expanding in the future will be I'll add additional capabilities, if you will, to it to flesh out different areas of product development.

Tom Raftery: 2:25

Okay. And who is the typical customer?

Mark Landrosh: 2:28

Customers range, you know, from aerospace and defence, automotive IM&C, which is industrial machinery components through maybe consumer products. Anybody who's making a or producing a product that's going to be purchased by an end user or implemented by an end user. We also do have use cases for our certain capabilities that can be extended into areas such as professional services and banking and so forth. Anywhere that anybody has to collaborate on something that's coming out of coming out of SAP ERP.

Tom Raftery: 3:10

Okay, what problem are you solving for them with this enterprise product development?

Mark Landrosh: 3:18

We're providing them a way of bringing together different disciplines within the lifecycle, the product, things such as systems modelling, requirements management, bringing together those different types of solutions into one area, into one one product, and allowing them to explore based on their their need within the particular stage of their product development process. For example, you know, on the front end of a product development process, there might be the the requirements to do a lot of investigation and defining the product and laying things out and assigning tasks. Then a little bit later that might, you know, require people to start collaborating on design work and so forth, pulling information out of ERP, pulling information from other areas, working on those together, you know, being able to visualise the product designs, allowing them to make decisions based on those product designs, pulling together different data sources and so forth. You know, it allows our customers the flexibility of working on with different solution areas, different solution needs for product development. Well, just basically purchasing one solution from SAP. And then, you know, as I mentioned before, we're going to be adding additional capabilities into that as we further develop our PLM offerings in the cloud.

Tom Raftery: 4:57

Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What types of capabilities would be added?

Mark Landrosh: 5:04

Well, we really can't commit to anything due to our disclaimers on roadmaps. But, you know, some areas that you might think we could move into could be perhaps a recipe development, enhance change processes, change management, other areas like that to to make our solution, let's say, interesting for other customers to expand into or allow us to address other areas in industry that, you know, might be better served with additional capabilities, such as project management or configuration or so forth.

Tom Raftery: 5:50

OK. And why is it interesting for a customer that it's now cloud delivered. What what advantage does this give the customer?

Mark Landrosh: 6:01

Two things, in my opinion. You have you'll probably get different answers from different people, depending on who you ask in this stage of cloud deployment at that particular time. But, you know, you know, the obvious one is the infrastructure is provider already. You don't have to invest in hardware, your don't have to invest in software. You've got to continuous improvements that come as we I'm sorry, you do have to invest in software, but you're buying our software. You're not implementing it. So, you know, you don't have to buy the hardware. You don't have to install it. We manage that all for you. And it allows a customer to scale up very, very easily simply by adding more users into the system.

Tom Raftery: 6:46

You mentioned before we turned the recorder on a little bit about the the way this is priced. And it's kind of an innovative form of pricing that we have using using. You had an analogy around tokens. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Mark Landrosh: 7:03

Sure. So we don't. We have different capabilities within our enterprise product development solution. And those different capabilities have different, let's say, values. But you're only purchasing one material item from as SAP. So what we're selling this with is something called a capacity units. And this is analogous to using tokens. So if you are going to an arcade, perhaps, and you bring a handful of tokens with you, you know, a game such as Pacman might cost one token. Or if you want to play skee ball, that might be, you know, three tokens, or if you wanted to play billiards, there might be four or eight tokens depending. And that's how we use this with this particular product, is you buy a handful of capacity units and you can allocate those to the different capabilities that are inside of enterprise product development. So you might want to have, you know, maybe 10 requirements management users. You may want to have 100 collaboration users, and then you would allocate your tokens to those different areas. This provides our customers the flexibility to actually try out different areas of our enterprise product development solution and maybe reallocate those tokens as they're moving through different stages of their product development process. There might be they might be pretty heavy in one area at the beginning of a project, but as they're moving further on, they're going to switch to a different capability and they can do that on a monthly basis.

Tom Raftery: 8:47

Okay. You you also mentioned something about the visualisation abilities of the software, which sounded intriguing. Can you talk about that?

Mark Landrosh: 8:56

Sure. So in a typical engineering or CAD data management area, you're working with modelling tools that create very, very heavy, very large file size models. And those typically don't transfer very, very quickly across across the Internet. Now, to provide quick access for people that are outside of that, you know, engineering modelling area, we provide a capability that allows you to feed those weight engineering files into enterprise product development. We will reduce the file size and create a visualisation format which is optimised for streaming across the Web. We then also allow you to take that visualisation and do a few different things to it. First of all, we're allow you to take and create animations, create step by step procedures that would show perhaps how the product is built on the shop floor. Or maybe how it's maintained out in a field or even how it's supposed to be operated by an end user. That's one way of enriching the engineering data and allowing downstream users to interact with it and repurpose it. The unique thing that we can do with our visualisation solution is we tie it to business data. It might be tying it to a key attribute, like a material number or to an asset I.D.. And that allows us to start using the 3D visualisation as a reporting tool, as a new way of interacting with your business data. So we could, for example, pull ERP information from from S4 and reports upon a particular product at your viewing. Let's take maybe a valve, for example, for looking at a valve. And we want to see the countries of origin or the different components that are inside of it. We can quickly create maybe a pie chart based out of based on us for data and then colour code, the 3D model based on the elements in that report. So you might have all the components in one caller there from Germany, maybe all the other ones that are from China's in a different colour and allows us to quickly visually filter things out by looking at the 3D model. Now, if we want to get more information on perhaps the products that are sourced from Germany, we could then filter them out by that particular parameter and then start interacting. Maybe there's a circuit board inside of there that we want more information on. What's the costing information? Well, that may come from a different data source. So we can then, you know. Pull and merge two different data sets together and maybe pull information from our product lifecycle costing solution. So this allows you, you know, some pretty great flexibility in bringing to different datasets together and interacting with them. And in effect, this allows our customers to actually do more than just view the data, do more than just report on a data. It allows them to actually take action on the data. So, I mean, it's important to understand the ramifications of a change, but I think it's more important to be able to act on that in a controlled fashion and and continue that workflow. That's the value add that our visualisation gives you over competition is that you're able to take action then and maybe initiate a change report or initiate a maintenance request. If you're visualising a plant or whatnot.

Tom Raftery: 12:50

OK. Interesting. And completely out of ignorance on my part. If you can see a country by country breakdown of the parts of your device, whatever it is you're making. If there's some kind of disruption in the supply chain, some typhoon takes out some city or some port or something like that. Can you quickly go "ok all the parts in this device that come from that region are this, this, and this. So I need to source them from somewhere else." Would that work?

Mark Landrosh: 13:24

That's a perfect example. And it's something that we use in our demonstrations to talk about. You know, if there's a government restriction where we can't purchase from a particular country, we can quickly take a look at that, filter out a product and then, you know, act upon that and start looking for different sources of those components.

Tom Raftery: 13:45

OK. So, Mark, how are customers doing their product development today and how would this help them?

Mark Landrosh: 13:52

Typically what we're seeing is a lot of our customers are working in disconnected systems. Yesterday gain advantages by working within their silos, by being able to complete their particular task. But where they lose the you know, the connexion is, is when they have to pass data from one system to another. Now, our enterprise product development solution allows us to connect those different data silos, allows our customers to work in one environment, if you will, and it allows them to reimagine their innovation process, how they how they, how they work together, how they perform those traditional tasks. You know, when we talk about the requirements management capability, we have this ability to tie down or retire requirements directly to the master data. So if I need to change a requirement, I know everything in my system that needs a change from a visualisation standpoint, being able to tie in to different data sources to help you visualise the day reporting that comes out of those business systems, help you make better decisions and then ultimately execute on them with our connected products capability. Allowing you to set up new business models for your customers are connected products allows us to set up a virtual representation of our product and feed it live sensor information from the assets that are out in the field and then, you know, allow us to do predictive analytics on it. And it's not only allowing the engineers to do predictive analytics. You could take that connected products virtual model and allow the end customers to sell those as an add on feature to the physical product itself. So it allows their customers to explore different business models. So it's this reimagining of the products of the innovation process that enterprise product development really allows our customers to do.

Tom Raftery: 16:07

Okay. Are there any sustainability wins that come along with this?

Mark Landrosh: 16:13

I yeah, there's there's definite sustainability plays within the different capability areas. You know, we talk about, you know, being able to filter by where a product is produced. You could also do something very similar to monitor the sustainability or products. You know, say are we using any products in this particular geography or any any materials in this particular geography which are either banned by the particular government or there's a growing and consumer concern about that particular product. You know, recyclable things or, you know, the use of plastics or the use of other hazardous materials. You can definitely use this as it is a quick check or a way for investigating, you know, what products are most likely to impact the market or have a negative impact based on the contents of them.

Tom Raftery: 17:22

OK, superb. We are coming up on the 20 minute mark now, Mark. And is there any question I haven't asked that you think I should ever is there anything that we've not talked about that you think it's important for people to be aware of it?

Mark Landrosh: 17:39

Just the fact that SAP has a, you know, a very strong commitment to our PLM solution area. We are enhancing it through our partnerships. We're enhancing it through internal product development. And, you know, just the fact that we are, you know, releasing new products will have new capabilities coming out for enterprise product development. And so we very much have a focus on what we can provide to our customers in terms of cloud capabilities.

Tom Raftery: 18:12

OK. So if people want to know more about yourself or about Enterprise Product Development or any of the things we've talked about in the podcast so far, where would you have me direct them?

Mark Landrosh: 18:26

People can come and find me on LinkedIn or we'll be having a launch of our Web site and I'll make sure that you have the appropriate information and you can put that into the show notes where they can get more information.

Tom Raftery: 18:40

Tremendous. Tremendous. That's great. Thanks a million Mark. And Thanks a million for coming on the show and telling us all about this new EPD product that you're launching here.

Mark Landrosh: 18:48

Thanks for having me, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 18:51

OK, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to SAP dot com slash digital supply chain. Or simply drop me an email to Tom Dot Raftery at SAP dot com. If you like to show, please don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find a show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.