Business Software Offer for Industry 4.0: the SAP case

Abstract

In order to face the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities brought by the “Digitalised Era”, the support of good quality information system is of paramount importance for companies. The objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent the current offer of business software is able to meet the set of requirements that manufacturing companies have to satisfy to cope with the digital transformation. First, a literature review is carried out identify Industry 4.0 business requirements. Then, the product portfolio of a business software market leader, SAP SE, is analysed as representative of the software offer available on the market. The SAP solutions that can match each business requirement are identified. The results show that almost all the business requirements are covered by current software offer, except for few cases for which the solution is still under development (i.e. Human-machine interaction, Machine learning).