SAP SE has announced the opening of a new SAP Co-Innovation Lab at its North America headquarters in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. SAP Co-Innovation Lab locations provide infrastructure and space for SAP and its partners and customers to co-innovate new solutions to the most pressing challenges organisations face in the digital economy. This new lab, SAP’s second in North America, will have a specific focus on creating business applications that deal with emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things and Big Data analytics.
Through collaborative framework and emphasis on co-innovation, these SAP labs accelerate the creation of new solutions that span multiple industries, including mining. “With benefits that include project support, reduced development costs and shorter time to market for new applications, SAP’s partners will be able to provide more value to customers, generate new business and build new alliances. Customers will also be able to take direct advantage from additional access to expertise and technology to transform ideas into solutions at a much quicker pace.”
The new SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Newtown Square brings SAP’s global total to 15, with others located in Germany, Brazil, India and China, among other places. In mining, the first lab set up at SAP Labs Silicon Valley looked at how IoT technology could improve safety and lower risk using real time situation awareness featuring the use of wearables. More recently, it is doing a lot of work on how to equip self-flying drones with machine learning-based computer vision technology. “Incorporating the vision intelligence into drones will bring the intelligence of location, vision and enterprise knowledge into one solution,” according to Xiwei Zhou, Director of Engineering, SAP Innovation Center Silicon Valley. SAP is also working on helping its Mining IBUs to address problems and challenges to get their drone data and services into SAP platforms and applications.
In a collaboration with MineRP, SAP Africa participated in a series of co-innovation projects that sought to integrate technical and business planning processes in the mining industry. By broadly grouping the industry into two domains – the science of mining and the business of mining – “the two companies jointly developed solutions that overcome the disconnect between technical and financial planning by enabling companies to run fully simulated financing and technical planning scenarios.”
“These labs are a testament to the important role SAP’s partners play in a customer’s digital transformation journey. Whether it’s the business challenges of today or the anticipated ones of tomorrow, SAP enables its partners to provide customers value in the digital economy.”
“Co-innovation builds an agile and vibrant partner ecosystem that drives value through external expertise in digital technologies, hardware and networks,” said Rodolpho Cardenuto, President, Global Channels & General Business, SAP. “With the launch of the co-innovation lab on the US East Coast, we are strengthening the innovative power of SAP and its partners in North America by expanding our digital ecosystem in the region.”
