OMP initiative aims to accelerate manufacturing innovation through industry collaboration.

To say manufacturing is a cut-throat business would be an understatement.
If you’ve ever toured a factory, especially as a member of the press, you’ll have a sense of just how closely manufacturers guard their secrets.
I once heard of a press tour in which a participant jokingly asked if he might be allowed to take a picture of just the ceiling. “Absolutely not,” came the immediate reply. “Our competitors could examine that picture and infer details about our shift schedules using the OSHA requirements for adequate lighting based on the number and density of personnel on the factory floor.”
With most industries operating on extremely tight margins, victory over the competition is often a matter of inches, if not millimeters. That’s what makes the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) so unusual. One of the myriad Linux Foundation Projects, the OMP aims to unite manufacturers, integrators, and technology providers in order to break down data silos, drive the development of platform-agnostic solutions, and create open standards for the benefit of the entire sector.
The platform already boasts an impressive roster of members, including:
- ABB
- Bosch
- Intel
- PTC
- Schaeffler
- Microsoft
- ZF Group
And now, enterprise software giant SAP has joined the initiative.
According to SAP’s Nils Herzberg, SVP and global head of Strategic Partners for Digital Supply Chain and Industry 4.0, the company joined the initiative to “accelerate supply chain innovations at scale through the power of open collaboration.” While that might sound strange coming from a company built on proprietary technologies, Herzberg explained SAP’s reason for buying into the OMP ethos:
“Not only do we live in the century of shared economies, but we also live in the time of collaborative development. The focus for the future will be stronger, more resilient supply chains coupled with agile production facilities. SAP has the supply chain applications to achieve this. As a member of the OMP, we will work with our customers and partners to create access to these future-oriented applications.”
The underlying strategy in this decision becomes apparent in light of OMP’s primary goals:
- Create solutions based on open standards that overcome the complexity of proprietary systems and vendor lock-in.
- Safely connect operational technology to the cloud to enable better data-backed decisions and predictions.
- Contribute to standards that drive automation and autonomy in production and logistics systems.
Each of these goals addresses a major hurdle for enterprise software providers like SAP, as well as other OMP members such as PTC and Microsoft.
Number 1 is essentially a form of adversarial interoperability: Make your new tech work with your competitors’ existing tech to obviate the switching costs from one platform to another.
Number 2 is a must-have for any company looking to offer advanced analytics or machine learning: Despite what you may have heard, machine learning needs the cloud to reach its full potential.
Number 3 opens the door to new potential business for SAP in areas of production or logistics that are currently “too manual” to benefit from the company’s more sophisticated solutions.
So, what does OMP get out of this? The answer should be obvious but, in case it’s not, here’s how Microsoft’s Christoph Berlin, Partner Group Program Manager for Azure Industrial IoT & Manufacturing puts it:
“The goal of the consortium is to bring together technology and applications to enable the next frontier of business value in manufacturing. This requires all levels of the stack to embrace open principles, open-source and open standards. We also welcome the extensive knowledge that SAP brings to the table from a supply chain and manufacturing reference architectures perspective. This will further strengthen OMP’s technology partnerships and collaboration across the manufacturing ecosystem.”
Grandiose aspirations aside, the real test of the ostensibly open nature of the OMP is this:
Will SMEs actually benefit from these new standards, or will they simply have no other choice but to adopt them?
Visit the OMP website to learn more.