Today, product development and manufacturing take place in cross-departmental and cross-company teams. Strongly networked partnerships characterize the picture of companies - customers, suppliers and worldwide locations determine the daily work routine. All parties involved depend on up-to-date 3D product data, drawings, reports, etc. in the appropriate format and with the necessary quality - and in near real time.

Typically, collaboration takes place outside the company's own internal SAP system, in many cases via data exchange via Excel files, e-mail or FTP server. To make matters worse, there is a different process for collaboration with almost every partner, and as a result there is usually no uniform process across partners.
What is the best way to implement error-free collaboration in real time without data gaps and media discontinuities?
With the SAP EPD Collaboration solution, you can shorten your time-to-market by collaborating more efficiently with your external and internal partners based on a single source of shared data: No more long response times to emails, no more missing data in an Excel file or eternal file download times to the FTP server - all united directly in the SAP system.

Cooperation - collaboration - is a central business approach of every modern company. External communication to customers, OEMs, suppliers and partners via portals and data sending tools is only part of the challenge.
The SAP EPD Collaboration solution for collaborative engineering supports companies in this challenge. The application options and functionalities take into account the various forms of collaboration - whether within the company boundaries or externally, whether with the participation of independent partners or within geographically distributed teams.
Security and transparency in collaboration are guaranteed by end-to-end process scenarios.

You and your partners cooperate on a common SAP cloud platform, according to your specified processes, with full access to all data and information. These are thus used redundancy-free and in your current version. Access to the SAP Cloud Platform allows you to flexibly integrate globally operating teams - from your own company as well as from external partners. An authorization concept for the respective scenarios ensures the protection of processes and data without restricting daily work.

The innovative SAP EPD Collaboration solution enables cross-functional and cross-system collaboration with collaborative functionalities. This includes the efficient creation of workflow-based collaboration as well as the assignment of specific user roles with which work items are assigned and authorizations are managed. In SAP EPD Collaboration, file-based data can be directly integrated and sent to the collaboration partner. It can also be exchanged to the SAP backend systems/ERP systems and document info records (DIS), material masters and material BOMs contained therein. This means that collaboration can take place directly.

SAP PLM users running SAP ECTR can transfer new content, changes and updates directly from SAP ECTR into a Collaboration session. In addition, structured data such as bills of materials from the SAP system can be added to SAP EPD Collaboration and referenced to requirements and other elements of the product model. The integrated Live Product Cockpit provides an overview of the collaboration.

• Collaborate securely and seamlessly on structured product data such as BoMs, materials, documents, specifications, and unstructured data such as files and images
• Increase collaboration efficiency with tools such as robust workflows, task management, integrated 3D viewer support and redlining
• Design Anywhere-Build Anywhere (DABA) capabilities are facilitated by allowing design and manufacturing teams to share and communicate product information to make decisions based on a single set of globally secure product data.
• Increased visibility & risk mitigation by engaging the right suppliers.