SAP announces a new collaboration with leading international technology and service company, Bosch Group. The partnership between the two German companies aims to deliver value chain management solutions and develop a digital industry standard that will simplify both internal and external digital business processes—thus allowing companies to realise substantial efficiency gains.
The Bosch-SAP collaboration is the latest among SAP’s strategic partnerships that aim to expand SAP’s market reach by co-innovating with partners to develop modular industry applications on its Business Technology Platform. Previously, SAP teamed up with Honeywell to address the challenges and digital trends in the real estate industry. In July, SAP announced its partnership with Siemens to deliver integrated and more powerful software solutions across product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) management.
This time, the Bosch-SAP collaboration aims to standardise and automate processes is to significantly simplify the global system landscape, continuously optimize workflows, and increase confidence in real-time analysis.
The partnership will see the transfer of Bosch business processes to SAP’s intelligent ERP software suite SAP S/4HANA for planning, controlling, and managing resources. According to the two companies, this will help shape the evolution of SAP S/4HANA and will ultimately benefit SAP customers worldwide.
SAP CEO Christian Klein said:
“Due to its industrial expertise and technology leadership in several fields, Bosch plays a key role in global supply and value chains. Together we are pursuing the goal of translating this expertise into digital form, using SAP S/4HANA as a basis.”
He also adds:
“Together, we will develop a blueprint for other companies as well and will thereby be able to help our customers drive continuous innovation by adopting best and next industry practices and to ultimately grow and transform their businesses to lead in their industries.”
The partnership will also drive internal digitalization forward at Bosch with the integration of SAP S/4HANA to facilitate a considerable increase in the options for real-time analysis and control optimization.
Value Chain Management Solutions for the Automotive Industry
According to Bosch and SAP, this co-innovation project offers a particular benefit for the global automotive industry.
In a blog post, Klein posits that for automotive companies to thrive in a rapidly changing world—where technology and innovation have become the key determinants in how successful businesses are run—they need to transform into intelligent enterprises. According to him, they can do this by:
- committing to digitalisation and a networked economy
- becoming flexible
- shifting their focus from hardware to software innovation
- leveraging a unified business network that connects the entire value chain across enterprises
The SAP CEO explains how the Bosch and SAP partnership will help automotive companies on their journeys to becoming intelligent enterprises:
“The partnership between Bosch and SAP that we announced emphasises our strong commitment to the automotive industry transformation. Together, we will develop a digital industry standard for the exchange and use of company data along the value chain, thus building the network for the automotive industry of the future.
From incoming orders to production and delivery to invoicing, we will build on Bosch’s industry expertise and leadership to translate business processes into SAP systems. By merging and automating these processes, we want to jointly define new digital standards and facilitate real-time data exchange with suppliers and customers to ultimately make the entire process more efficient.”
