Mathias Mond: 0:03

First and foremost, this is really about making information available to everyone, regardless of which system they are using as the primary system. So SAP people need access to engineering information, such as the latest status of product in work, and engineering types, people, designers, product managers, etc. Also need access to information about performance, the marketplace or logistic situation or security in the plan or whatever.

Tom Raftery: 0:35

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host, global vice president of SAP. Tom Raftery. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, with SAP and with me on the show today I have my two special guests, Matthias and our end. Gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourselves? Maybe Matthias go first?

Mathias Mond: 1:04

Yes, thank you, Tom, for the introduction for starting this meeting. And we're very happy to join our interview on this podcast. My name is Mathias Mond, I'm based out of Germany, Munich, Germany, I have been with Siemens for a while now. And my history with integration and with SAP actually goes back far longer than that goes back 25 years, first started in SAP integration with the early versions of SAP PDM, back in 1996, with my company back then, and had a great journey for the past 25 years, alongside SAP, and we did many great things. And so we are now at a point where we are enjoying a much closer partnership now than we ever had before. So my personal history is in software development in providing services around integration in managing companies in selling and helping sell software, so many, many things that I've done in the past. And so let's, let's start. Thank you.

Tom Raftery: 2:17

Thank you and Arend.

Arend Weil: 2:19

Thank you very much, Tom, for having me. It's pleasure to be here, together with you. And Matthias Of course, my name is Arend or in Germany would say like Arend, as you can easily tell. I'm located here in Germany, and alongside to Mathias, also based in Munich. My role at SAP these days is to run the portfolio and product management when it comes to our strategic partnership together with Siemens.

Tom Raftery: 2:46

Okay, superb. And I published a podcast a few weeks ago with Gary Webb talking about this partnership. But I thought we'd have this call as well to dig into it in a little more detail. So to you both. Why do SAP and Siemens have this partnership? Why do we need it? What's it about Matthias, maybe you want to kick off.

Mathias Mond: 3:07

So yes, in order to shed some light on there, let me rewind a little bit and talk a little bit more about our history of doing integrations between Siemens products and SAP products. So like I said, we started 25 years ago. And we really embarked on integrating Teamcenter with SAP with SAP Business suite are great back then, in earnest in the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, that were was a time when companies discovered that they needed to do something about their manual way of transferring data back and forth between engineering and business systems. So that was the early days of integration. And we tagline started out by providing a an integration product that facilitated that. Now that has grown a lot since then. And we still offer that to our customers, we have hundreds of customers that are using that software. But now we have come to a point where a few things have changed. So it's time to take the next major step. We already have a broader deep integration. But now since SAP has started to resell Teamcenter and with other aspects also, moving in here, like cloud cloud is very important in this in this context. We have new challenges arising first of all, from the fact that our customers expect SAP and Siemens to build a much broader and much tighter integration than before. Now that SAP and Siemens are really linked together by the SAP selling Teamcenter as well alongside what Siemens does, that increases the desire of our customers to link the two much closer together than before. And so while what we've done in the past works really well is very robust, very functional, we do think, in collaborating with SAP in the way that we can work together with SAP knowing everything about their products. And we know knowing everything about our products, one plus one equals at least three. And we can build much, much better digital threads than we could before. Because both sides are fully engaged here fully involved. And as we will talk about, I'm sure, work together really well, on designing, planning, building this integration. So that's one thing and the other thing is cloud, our customers are starting to move to the cloud, at least considering it. And so what we've done in the past was really 100% on premise, I would say, but there's a strong move towards public cloud towards towards multi tenant cloud systems on both the Teamcenter side and the SAP side. And so, this is also something that we have to factor in and that necessitates a slightly different architecture than before. So, two major reasons why we are taking the step

Arend Weil: 6:26

out, okay. Okay, let me let me add to that, and share one or two additional aspects. One is, because of all from the sap perspective, and from our customers perspective, Siemens is a leader. Whenever it gets complex, you know, whenever products get complex, think, you know, if you build an aircraft, spaceship, you name it, Siemens is a very much preferred and globally leading partner, obviously, and from SAP perspective, for us making that offer also to our customers, is really appreciated by our customers. So the immediate reactions, which we did get, when we said, hey, we're gonna take that into our portfolio and integrate Teamcenter also for discrete on manufacturing customers, the customer, our customers came back to us saying, okay, great idea, you know, I looked for that. And let's, let's get into the discussion. And, you know, that's, so that's one aspect, really addressing our customer needs. And the other one, which I briefly want to want to highlight is everybody's talking about digital these days. So Matthias also touched on it, engineering is about creativity. And, you know, with the possibilities with digitalization, you know, it's basically it's a goldmine of product data. And this integration and our collaboration is really about making sure we create that creative and of, of the engineering world with this ASAP expertise around integrating end to end processes across the enterprise. And for specifically for every, every industry, we are we are tackling right. And that combination, I think, is also one which really drives us forward.

Tom Raftery: 8:17

Okay, and how does the partnership work in practical terms?

Mathias Mond: 8:22

Right, it works great, I have to say, I mean, we have a long history, as I said, with the SAP partnership, and that certainly helped because some of the participants in both on both sides actually knew each other already. I mean, Aaron and I we did not really know each other but we had an opportunity despite the COVID situation to indeed meet face to face once last year, at least once so was

Arend Weil: 8:49

Don't forget don't forget about the Beer Garden meeting we had Well yeah.

Mathias Mond: 8:54

This year it got a lot better of course, because mimic relax a bit. And so we were indeed able to have both teams sit together in their garden, multiple times actually already. Which, which is of course very helpful. But

Tom Raftery: 9:08

beer or the sitting together no

Mathias Mond: 9:11

comment. We're Germans, right? Most of us at least arguments I mean, not not everybody who joined us in beer garden is indeed a German citizen and as German history but but even those coming in from abroad are typically adapting to, to do a beer garden situation pretty easily. So all around right now, but but that has also basically a reflection of how the partnership works overall. I mean, we are very much aligned in all aspects in all phases of building, designing, building testing, ready in the integration for the market. So we have experts on both sides who really understand what they're doing. We of course, on the Siemens side have a lot of expertise in our team, with many, many customers situation Since that is very, very helpful, your people also have a lot of expertise likewise in on your side of the integration and the growth of the mutual understanding of each other's goals and methods, etc, etc, has been really very rapid. And so I can really confidently say that from design concept to build building the integration to planning, the synchronization of the development steps to the testing and Product Validation qualification to then packaging up the product to ship it to the customer, we are really very well in sync. And I mean, there may be the occasional differences here and there. But I have to say that we've always been able to resolve them on the lower levels on the working levels very, very smoothly. So overall, I would say it's a great partnership.

Arend Weil: 10:59

Yeah, and let me let me add here to what Matthias just also highlighted, like he said, I can also only confirm from a sap perspective, it is a great collaboration, you know, and I think it's also inspiring on both sides, because we come with two different backgrounds and experiences. And that really, that model, like one, one equals three might be a nice, nice headline in that regard. But the other aspect, which might be a slightly touch, I mean, we did clearly also come across areas where, you know, for example, portfolios partially overlap. And, you know, we resolve that by basically following two principles. One is, you know, our ambition is to integrate Teamcenter as if it were an SAP product, to put it that way, you know, me being responsible for product management, on sa P side, I think that's a good, that's a good kind of nice, let's integrate it as if it were an SA P product, across all those different areas, you know, in the core engineering context, but also in service context in, you name it when it comes to very in configuration and similar topics. But then, when it comes to kind of overlapping areas, I mean, at the end of the day, we need to care about our customers perspective, and the customer basically chooses, depending on his requirements, what he wants to go for. So the other, let's say, principle, Northstar, which we both committed to is, let's respect and support customer choice, right. And that is also whenever we get into areas of, let's say, different perspectives to put it that way. That is basically our No, so let's support the customer in his choice, make a proposal prepare for the possible scenarios. But with that, we took those hurdles and discussions point also. And we're gonna do going forward as well. Okay, and

Mathias Mond: 12:55

gone. Let me expand on that a little bit. So a customer has a choice, that means that we as the integration team, essentially take a neutral stance here. So we are saying we support both an SAP perspective on driving such an integration as well as a Siemens perspective. And so we from the Siemens side, for instance, our around sales, people will approach our customers with a proposal that probably relies more on Siemens products than the SAP sales team does, right? And both is fine. Actually, both is fine. So a customer may see a proposal for driving digital threats across both systems that looks different from the SAP or from Siemens perspective, both are valid, both will be supported by or are supported by the integration. And the customer really has a choice and can can pick whatever they want. And in the marketplace, or sometimes there is competition between SAP and Siemens. And that's natural, right? We are still two distinct companies. Sure. So we need to clearly distinguish between the go to market aspect where we do compete, but we took that also the development aspect, the integration product development aspect, and there we fully collaborate in the interest of our customers.

Tom Raftery: 14:11

Great. Matthias, you said at the start that you'd been working in this kind of area of integration of SAP with Siemens products for 20 something years now, what's different with this integration? I mean, if integration is nothing new?

Mathias Mond: 14:27

Well, the difference is that we have learned a lot of course along the way. I mean, when we first started, obviously, both our own knowledge and our our customer knowledge about doing building integrations was very, very minimal. Now along the way, we now know how to build robust integrations, how to build performant integrations, how to build integrations that fit our customer's needs, and not least are flexible enough to accommodate pretty much any scenario requirements that our customers may throw at us because As we go to market with our own recommendations for best practice scenarios, the customers typically may still have some some different views on that one, right? They, they may say, Well, this is something, that's fine, but it doesn't quite fit our purpose. So we bring that in. And we now apply that to an evolution of our of the architecture that we have built before. And similarly, on the SAP side, you've built your own architecture that you've built before. And we are bringing the two together with a new model that relies on a middle layer on a on a domain or meta domain layer, where both business domains, both data models come together, and are reflected as a common middle ground. And so that in conjunction with an evolution of the architecture that not only in the future accommodates on premise, but also cloud or any combination of cloud and on premise, ie hybrid, that those two things together really are what signifies the evolution of the integration. And just let me mention also that we see we see it really, as an evolutionary step, it's not a revolution, many things will be new, will be better, or are new and better already. I mean, we're just up the first step of the journey, we just released our first product a week ago. So this is still first step. So a lot more to come. And so what we've done for our, for our current customers is an evolution. And we are guiding them along the way to allow them to take the step with this new integration, at their own pace. In our, our mantra is your way, your pace, there is the customer, you can take the step whenever you want. We don't push you, whenever you feel ready, when you feel like this new product is providing compelling value, we will help you take that step. And for new customers, obviously, they can jump on board right on, and we will of course guide them on the way as well.

Arend Weil: 17:13

Yeah. And I mean to also reflect on the journey behind us, since we started the partnership to partnership July last year. I mean, we achieved what Mateus just described by you know, not just purely focusing on the data integration, you know, we achieve that by Yes, defining a domain model, right, a common dictionary, so to speak, on one side, but we also always put that in context of the end to end business processes. And, you know, despite the fact that there have been, of course, you know, saps about openness, we are open to integrate third party solutions. But a strategic partnership brings in another quality to that, because we jointly walk through the processes, discuss the details, discuss the variance. Also, as we discussed earlier, the variance from a, from a customer, customer perspective they might go for, and translate that into the integration, you know, into the what we as a product called PLM system integration with a counterpart on demand side, that team center, correct me if I'm wrong, but here's the team set a gateway for PLM system integration, right? Those two components are tailored to that jointly developed, jointly designed thought 20 tested. And at the end of the day, from a customer perspective, this is about simplicity. This is about guidance. You know, I've been with our services team before at SAP and one of our board members always said it's about it's not about choice, it's about guidance, right, give me guidance, which relates to my industry will my requirements, and from there I can adopt, and I can, you know, tweak elements, which are unique to my business. And I think that's what we went through the last one and a half years, we basically aligned on our, our try and perspective on to end on the end to end processes. We aligned on a roadmap going forward until end of end of next year. And we delivered, like Medea said with the first step now with a with the initial integration product, and that journey is going to continue obviously,

Tom Raftery: 19:28

okay, and just for people listening, just to clarify, we are recording this in the first week of November. So the publication date will probably be a week or two from now, depending. So when Matthias said that it was released last week. It was released at the end of October 20 21/25

Arend Weil: 19:47

of October. Thank you. And by the way, you know one of the good signs of that partnership is you know, we said actually, I think it was in Spring this year that we got a release on 25th of October and we did so, you know, while keeping us crossed, I think that's a good sign also for the productiveness of our

Tom Raftery: 20:09

collaboration. If I'm a SAP or a Siemens customer, what's in it for me? Maybe Matthias, again, you wanna kick off?

Mathias Mond: 20:18

Well, let's first start by talking about what what what education does in the first place. And that is really making sure that information is accessible to everyone who needs access to it at the time that they needed, guided by their by access, control, etc, of course, I mean, we are we are serious company. So we do that, of course, we provide the security around that as well. But first and foremost, this is really about making information available to everyone, regardless of which system they are using as the primary system. So SAP people, people using sa ps4, Hana need access to engineering information, such as the latest status of product in work, and engineering types, people, designers, product managers, etc. Also need access to information about performance in marketplace or logistic situation or securing the plan or whatever, right, many, many reasons to access information that is not stored in the primary system. So that's what what integration does. And this new integration that we're that we have built, Amanda released as a first release already and are continuing to build full speed is one that expands on the possibilities here. So we intend to go much, much broader than we've done in the past, Siemens Teamcenter, and also sa ps4 Hana is constantly growing their footprint, and also their their breadth of applications that are part of those families. And not all of that has been connected in the past. And we are taking the steps to also approach areas that are maybe not front and center as a first step like product portfolio management, like supply chain management. Also, product configuration is one that is more more on the top of the agenda these days, I would say so many areas that are being covered as we go. And also likely, like we said before, backed up by the full set of expertise on both ends with the teams of experts and the S Vahana experts working together on a daily basis to make it happen. You know,

Arend Weil: 22:44

and by the way, Tom, thanks for always sending the questions first over to Matthias makes my life very easy today.

Tom Raftery: 22:52

He's a guest on podcast Come on, of course, he's gonna

Arend Weil: 22:55

you know, I, again, I fully fully agree what what Matthias just describe, you know, now you did ask, you know, what, from a customer perspective, inform me, if I take, like, the privilege of looking at that from a 30,000 feet perspective, you know, our expectation is that with the approach which we implemented, we will provide an integration solution, which on the one side opens this new world of new possibilities. I mean, since we jointly really dive into the details of how very in configuration, how manufacturing engineering how also service could could benefit from those new possibilities. But at the end of the day, you know, we also want to provide that at low, optimized low, however you want to phrase it, low total cost of implementation, you know, reduce the implementation efforts, and reduce the costs of running and managing and supporting this integration as well. I think that is also an ambition, which we jointly share based on our experience, and which we believe is the ground is laid for that for that integration, which we are now offering and bringing here to the market.

Tom Raftery: 24:13

Okay. And if I'm a customer, how do I proceed? What what what steps do I take to get on board with this integration? Sometimes?

Arend Weil: 24:24

Thanks. Thanks again

Tom Raftery: 24:26

or Mathias, if you'd like Arend to go first...

Mathias Mond: 24:31

Yep, so that's how that's the way how you treat your guests. Right. But first, I don't I don't mind. That's why by done now, thank you for your great questions. So now, Siemens customers and SAP customers at this point, they need to go to their respective account managers and talk to them about contracting for the Siemens part of the integration and the SAP part of the integration respectively. We're still discussing how to facilitate a bundling of the integration so that a customer could buy both products from either Siemens or SAP, there are some complicated, there are some administrative complications along the way to make that happen, but the products are available, they work together, seem seamlessly they work together as if they were sold by one company. And let me say that they are also backed up by a support structure, where we are minimizing friction. So if a problem arises, be it on the semen side, on the Orion the SAP side, we have processes in place methods in place, that facilitate a smooth resolution, regardless of where the problem arises from. So talk to your account managers go to our websites on the both on both the SAP side and the same inside. And, and let me say from the Siemens perspective, that in this case, I would even ask customers to look at the SAP roadmap site, where it's actually where you can find all the details about the roadmap for the release that already is out, plus the upcoming, two additional releases that we're currently planning for and building already, I have to admit that SAP has a has a better way of presenting that roadmap to customers than than we do so happy to point to the SAP roadmap page in this case, which is accessible to all SAP customers. Yes, and

Arend Weil: 27:09

I mean, like Matthias just described, get in touch talk to us. We also got global representatives, global Coe, which is supporting the purchase integration, but also the positioning of the portfolio, which we offer on top of our native on top of our native SAP portfolio. By the way, for each, for each release, we also running a so called customer engagement initiative. You know, if you have ideas on how to evolve a specific scenario, and wanted want to talk about that, share your ideas, I mean, door is wide open as well. So happy to get into those conversations as well. Right.

Tom Raftery: 27:47

Okay. And seeing, as you mentioned, scenarios, what are some possible advanced scenarios that people might get with upcoming releases going forward?

Arend Weil: 27:56

I mean, they're Gareth. As far as I've seen, he talked a little bit about the six strategic development areas, right. Don't make me to, to quote them. I mean, he did a brilliant job on that. I mean, maybe portfolio and project management is one, systems engineering, you name it, vendor collaboration or supplier collaboration, service. I mean, let me take that one. As an example, thinking about service, obviously, we got much many more capabilities these days to track an asset or a product, so to speak, to understand how it's used to also record the customer experience, why wouldn't we use that? Why wouldn't we make that information accessible also, as part of the collaboration we are working on to, to engineering, I mean, those are for this is one example of many, where you could go and where we are thinking about going beyond business as usual, to put it that way.

Tom Raftery: 29:00

Okay, Mathias anything to add?

Mathias Mond: 29:03

Yeah. So one area that we are tackling in the course of the next 12 months is manufacturing manufacturing planning, which is actually an area where both companies have offerings, but we have agreed to support both perspectives. So we have customers who run more of them or infection planning on the Siemens side, or either also on the SAP side. And so we are busy planning for supporting scenarios that allow our customers to smoothly link all the way from design engineering, to manufacturing, engineering, manufacturing, planning, all the way to production, and everything around that. So there's a lot of great things to come on that front. The bulk of that will actually be available become available in a year's time.

Tom Raftery: 29:57

Okay, super super. Gentlemen, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now, is there any question that I have not asked that you wish I had or any topic we've not covered off that you think it's important for people to be aware of? And no is a perfectly good answer. If you think we covered it.

Arend Weil: 30:20

I would say from my perspective from No, I think, you know, we we touched a lot of the topics which I thought about when when thinking about this conversation. Yeah. All of them basically the only thing which which is Left me is thank you for having me. And I also want to thank Mateus and his team for a great collaboration. That's, that's part of an important part of the fun we're having last but not least, our customers, right? Without them without their feedback and guidance, you know, that wouldn't be possible. So And rest assured sort of speak. journey has just begun, you

Mathias Mond: 30:54

know. Thanks, indeed. Thank you. Thanks, Tom, and, and you for being on this podcast with me your talk for time to host this podcast and make it happen. But let me let me just highlight one, one aspect that we briefly touched upon, but really did not elaborate much on and that is the COVID situation, the pandemic, right, we talked about how we really work together really well. And so the surprising thing, from my perspective, really, is that we were able to make that happen in a situation where we had to start, right as the pandemic got underway. So we had our first serious conversations about 18 months ago, that was in March, April, last year, and that was right when the pandemic started. And so we really did not have an opportunity to meet face to face at all. And initially, I guess both sides, at least certainly, I was thinking that it might be really, really difficult to get this going to fill the partnership with life with really making it happen. But then it turned out that we are virtual meetings, we really achieved a lot, a lot more than I would have expected. And that it actually was pretty helpful also, that people were used to getting on ad hoc meetings, we are aware, otherwise, we might have planned for more face to face meetings, we might have had to wait a couple of days or even a week until we would come together. So the downside of being in this pandemic situation wasn't actually that great. But having said that, then eventually when we were able to meet face to face, especially in the beergarden situations, that was indeed very, very helpful as well. And so it turns out that when you do see people face to face, when you interact with them face to face, and directly talk to them, you will still discover some nuances that you were not aware before. And that's good. So there's no no taking away from the fact that face to face meeting will not be replaced. But overall, I think we were all very happy that we were able to make such a complex collaboration, which is it is complex, because we are big, big companies, we are big elephants, we sometimes are difficult to work with neutrally, I would say. But we were able to make it happen, we were able to pull it off. And we also had many joint customer discussions along the way. In the meantime, our MPP touched on that already. So and we are looking to have a forward looking forward to having many more of them. And we're inviting our customers to come back to us. Talk to us and find out more.

Tom Raftery: 33:48

Super, super. Gentlemen, if people would like to know more about the partnership or about either of yourselves, where would you have me direct them

Arend Weil: 33:56

Mateus touched on it, the roadmap pages are quite insightful. The Help documentation is quite broad, and touches, scenarios, architecture. And then of course, all configuration aspects and so on. So that's a useful resource. There is LinkedIn obviously to get in touch directly. And like reduce what like we mentioned, our teams also have to take questions and and get into discussions. Super nice. Yeah, same same here. So

Mathias Mond: 34:28

we already mentioned the SAP roadmap page, which is the best source in this case, but also the the help documentation which is available both from SAP and Siemens. I'm available on LinkedIn. My direct email is mathias.mond@siemens.com. And I think you will link that in your in your podcast notes, because that may be easier to decipher them. And otherwise, always a good source is our general Siemens website, of course, for more information on the product portfolio that we have,

Tom Raftery: 35:01

super, super well have links to those in the show notes, as you said, Great, fantastic. Gentlemen, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Arend Weil: 35:10

Thank you, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 35:12

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks, everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sa p.com/digital supply chain or, or simply drop me an email to Tom Raftery at sa p.com. If you'd like to show, please don't forget to subscribe to it and your podcast. test application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. catch you all next time