SAP promotes 3D printing

The SAP Distributed Manufacturing Early Access Program is designed to enable manufacturing companies, industrial 3D printing companies and service providers, material suppliers, postal operators, and global logistics networks to standardize and scale their business processes for digitizing, approving, verifying, and manufacturing digital parts in an end-to-end digital manufacturing process. The program is a building block of the SAP Leonardo IoT portfolio.

More than a prototype

So far, SAP is still working with 30 innovation partners as part of the program. Now the initiative is to be expanded to include additional companies that can test and evaluate the 3D printing process even before the new SAP application is expected to be available later this year.

Participating companies are invited to be innovative and creative and in this way contribute new ideas on product design, optimize manufacturing and logistics processes, and develop new business models.

They can keep their slow-moving inventories small while meeting time-critical customer demands, take advantage of opportunities to easily manufacture one-offs, and consistently produce high-quality, low-cost certified parts.

"This SAP program is ideal for us"

said Nikolai Zaepernick, Senior Vice President at EOS Central Europe.

"It is the optimal collaboration platform to combine supply and demand for the industrial 3D printing process.

As a market leader in this field, EOS brings its extensive and long-standing technology expertise to the table. Through the platform, we can also integrate our technology into existing logistics chains and production environments, which will become an established manufacturing process in the future."

This joint project brings together two renowned brands in the industry to advance 3D printing with SAP digital supply chain solutions and UPS applications for generative manufacturing and logistics networks.

To raise awareness of the potential for change that distributed manufacturing brings, SAP and UPS recently sat down with industry leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Together, they explored the ways in which 3D printing, the Internet of Things, and new technologies in manufacturing and logistics can revolutionize markets, the regulatory environment, and the global trade network.