Let me paint you a picture.

You're the asset manager for a 400-kilometre natural gas pipeline. You know every section of it. You know that kilometres 12 to 18 have a specific coating type that was applied after a repair in 2019. You know that the elevation changes sharply around kilometre 247, which affects inspection intervals. You know that three sections are scheduled for a pigging run next quarter and that the work orders for those sections need to carry precise start and end chainage values so the crews know exactly where to set up.

All of that knowledge lives in SAP. It has lived in SAP for years.

But the moment someone wants to pull that data into a GIS platform, sync it with a mobile inspection app, or push it from a third-party asset management system back into SAP — suddenly things get complicated. Because until recently, the rich linear data that SAP stores about your assets wasn't really accessible through standard APIs. You could see it in the UI. You could report on it. But programmatic access? Patchy at best.