Current Status and Challenges

SAP solutions power the intelligent enterprise, cover all lines of business, and encompass data analytics, database and data management, and AI-driven information management. The SAP Business Technology Platform is the underlying framework and foundational service for the intelligent enterprise. The SAP Business Technology Platform supports flexible integration and connections for various intra-company systems and solutions by external partners to offer a unified view of a complex business landscape and its associated data and processes.

While intra-company systems and externally available data sources can already be connected to improve analytical processes and machine learning models, there is an untapped source of siloed, sensitive enterprise data that cannot be easily shared in the clear as it contains personal or business confidential information. Regulatory concerns, privacy issues, and an increasing number of data sovereignty laws prevent straightforward data exchanges and require privacy-preserving collaborative computation to overcome these challenges.

The Pilot

To foster further business collaboration and enterprise data sharing in, e.g., the automotive sector, SAP Security Research will investigate and improve privacy-enhancing technologies (secure computation, differential privacy) for cross-company business processes and collaborative analytics. To combine distributed data sources such as manufacturing IoT sensors and industrial edge servers from, e.g., car manufacturers, automotive suppliers, and production partners.

To realize the use case, SAP will develop efficient, accurate, privacy-preserving technologies envisioned to expand the SAP Business Technology Platform and the current data-sharing paradigm with privacy-preserving analytics and augmented planning to reduce inefficiencies and waste for demand forecasting and resource planning during the production lifecycle.

Expected Outcomes and KPI

The expected, interconnected outcomes for the collaborative, privacy-preserving computation are as follows: 

(1) higher analytics accuracy than single-data or general-purpose privacy-preserving solutions

(2) reduced waste due to collaborative data-driven forecasting and planning

Baseline Assets

The SAP Business Technology Platform is the foundational service capable to enhance partner collaboration and interconnections for businesses. During the project we will exchange technological expertise with the platform development teams to foster technology transfer from the research and development activities from GLACIATION into the SAP products. Furthermore, we plan to liaison with Catena-X, i.e., the automotive alliance realized with GAIA-X, regarding privacy-enhancing technologies and their potential exploitation for collaborative supply chain optimization.