“It’s a digital mirror. It’s a digital twin of the product, a twin of the asset, a mirror of the world. This allows us to begin to dynamically adjust processes. The philosophy we have is that we want to create a digital mirror of the real world with this environment.”

The fourth industrial revolution is living up to its name. Digital transformation impacts nearly every industry, but it’s especially useful in applications where it can bring to light valuable data which would otherwise be inaccessible. One example is adding internet-connected sensors to machine tools, allowing production data to be analyzed in the cloud. In healthcare, IoT is used for remote health monitoring, which uses connected devices such as wearables to eliminate the need for some visits and checkups, saving time and costs.

Just like in these examples, supply chain management involves a lot of obscured and inaccessible data, meaning a lot of opportunities for IoT, enabling leaner and more sophisticated supply chains.


Supply chains are the specialty of the global industrial software giant SAP. We interviewed Hans Thalbauer, senior VP of supply chain and IoT at SAP, to find out more about how IoT will change industrial supply chains.

“Digital supply chain is all of the solutions and business processes that are relevant for the Chief Operating Officer,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior VP of supply chain and IoT at SAP.  “We define it in a way where we say we need to combine years of ledger planning, we need to include logistics and transportation management topics, but also the engineering, R&D, manufacturing and asset management areas. In this context, industry 4.0 and the industrial internet of things are super important.”