SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, today announced the opening of the early access program for the SAP Distributed Manufacturing application to new customers as part of its joint collaboration with UPS.

The move bolsters SAP’s effort to make 3D printing and on-demand manufacturing an integral part of the digital manufacturing landscape.

The SAP Distributed Manufacturing early access program intends to provide discrete manufacturers, industrial 3D printing companies and service providers, materials providers, postal companies and global logistics networks with standard and scalable business processes for digitizing, approving, certifying and manufacturing digital parts in an end-to-end digital manufacturing process. The program is part of the SAP Leonardo IoT portfolio.

“At Moog we are both suppliers and consumers of additive manufacturing as a service,” said Gonzalo Rey, chief technology officer, Moog Inc. “Our collaboration with SAP is accelerating the development of the tools necessary to find the best candidates for 3D printing. As a service, these tools can help accelerate the adoption process for everyone.”

Beyond Prototyping

SAP is currently working with 28 co-innovation companies in the program, and is expanding the initiative to offer more organizations the ability to test and approve 3D printing before the anticipated general availability of the new application from SAP planned for later this year. Participating companies can explore opportunities to drive innovation by rethinking product design, optimizing manufacturing and logistics processes, and creating new business models. They can “right size” their inventory for slow-moving parts while meeting time-sensitive customer needs, take advantage of opportunities to easily produce unique custom goods, and improve production consistency with high-quality, low-cost certified parts.

“This SAP program is a perfect fit for us,” said Nikolai Zaepernick, senior vice president, EOS Central Europe. “It provides an ideal collaboration platform to merge supply and demand for the industrial 3D printing technology we offer. As a leader in this field, EOS contributes a wealth of deep and long-standing technology experience. The platform, on the other hand, enables us to integrate our technology into existing supply chains and production environments on the way to becoming an established way of manufacturing.”

To learn more about the next phase of the early access program and how to register for participation, interested companies can visit here.

SAP + UPS: Connecting the Shop Floor to the Front Door

This collaboration brings together two of the industry’s most trusted brands to advance 3D printing with digital supply chain solutions from SAP and the additive industrial manufacturing and logistics network of UPS. To advance awareness of the transformative potential of distributed manufacturing, SAP and UPS recently engaged industry leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos to examine how 3D printing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and emerging technologies in manufacturing and logistics will transform markets, policies and world trade networks. Replays of the session and interviews with panelists are available here.