For over two decades SAP has been providing solutions to customers in defence and other industries the ability to operate in communication challenged environments. SAP has worked directly with customers as well as through the Defence Interest Group which represents our military customers and provide consolidated requirements on this topic. While advances have been made in establishing pervasive networks, be it garrison or at remote sites, there are still several situations where connectivity to enterprise systems prevents direct access to them:

• the type of connectivity often varies by location or situation
• data transmission costs may be too high for limited budgets
• data transmission is degraded or not permitted for safety or operational reasons
• transmission protocols restrict how data can be transmitted and stored
• backend systems are not available (planned or unplanned)

These situations can occur within the national boundaries of a customer or when they operate elsewhere around the globe.

In contrast to individuals, teams have the added requirement to share data and information even in communication challenged environments. This is because enterprise processes are typically conducted by more than one individual and as such, there is a need for shared situational awareness. For example, when fulfilling demand, one must wait till the goods receipt has been recorded to record a goods issue, especially when it’s important to track against batch or serial numbers.

As such, people need to continue to work in these communications challenged environments:

• individuals for a few minutes or hours while they are away from their “desk” working in zones without network connectivity. These could be on base or at remote site on operation or exercise where there is little to no network or it’s unsafe to transmit due to the proximity to explosives. Another example is an air force crew bringing an offline device to keep track of maintenance activities and parts consumed while away on missions. Typically, these individuals would synchronize after their return to their “desk”. SAP customers, across a multitude of industries, rely on SAP applications to enable their remote field workers to maintain their own and their customer assets.
• Teams for a few days to one or several weeks away from their home base. This could be a team deployed on exercise or operation such as in humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, or higher intensity operation. Be it a land, air, naval or joint deployment. Small teams such as on a small vessel or an air task group or much larger deployments. These include naval customers who manage the logistics process on board their vessels on deployments lasting multiple months. Similarly, teams in the commercial shipping and oil & gas industries use SAP solution to manage their logistics processes offline.

Typically, synchronization occurs on a periodic basis (e.g. daily or less frequently) or on an ad-hoc basis whenever individuals or teams can establish a connection to synchronize. In rare cases, they would synchronize only upon their return to their home base. There are no technical limits to how long individuals and teams can operate without synchronizations. This is because at some point there is a need for these individuals or teams to request supplies or maintenance as they are no longer fully self-sufficient.

Broadly, customers look to SAP for the following to enable logistics processes:

• Provide individuals and teams the ability to have access to business essential functions (i.e. a subset) of their enterprise system while operating in communication challenged environments
• Provide end-users a resilient, modern, and consistent user experience across devices
• Provide a resilient, modern, and consistent technology platform that customers can extend and integrate with other systems (e.g. IoT and Battle Management) as well as manage and support them in a distributed IT landscape

SAP S/4HANA Defense & Security and SAP Service & Asset Manager are the key enablers for teams and individuals respectively.

These products provide technology to establish and synchronize data across the communication challenged landscape:

• Identify the sufficient master and transactional data subset from the enterprise system to be transferred to the system of the individual and the team to minimize the IT footprint
• Detect and synchronize new and changed data to the relevant recipients while maintaining transactional integrity
• Establish mechanisms to minimize the occurrences of data synchronization errors from data conflicts

Our customers can operate in a variety of communication challenged environments and provide the tools for users to seamlessly work regardless of the status of the network. The IT organization has in their hands familiar technologies to manage their SAP landscape. Finally, Commanders at all levels can make better readiness based decisions from data from the edge.