Driving engineering efficiency in discrete manufacturing with SAP PLM-ECTR CAD integration

The discrete manufacturers are competing based on speed, quality, and cost, yet many organizations are working with isolated tools, emails, spreadsheets, and manual updates of CAD files, engineering bills of material (EBOMs), and change approvals to SAP. This is bound to lead to time waste, delays, redundancy, and quality issues.

This paper describes the incorporation of SAP Engineering Control Center (ECTR) and SAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and a direct connection to the leading CAD systems, creating a controlled enterprise-wide digital connection.

The functionality of the ECTR, the compatibility of the CAD tools and their integration with other systems, and the coincidence of CAD, BOM, document, and change processes in SAP are described to provide consistency of data, speed up engineering changes, and make the work of the engineers more effective and shorter.

An implementation playbook, Technical Architecture Overview, Digital Thread Enablement, and KPIs and Success Metrics are also presented in this paper, along with a real-life example of a well-known supplier of forged-metal components and a major precision manufacturing supplier, and a future outlook on what Industry 4.0 and digital twin scenarios can achieve with the help of this integration.