Today Joule in production does two realistic things well: it answers natural-language questions about production and process orders, and — through the new Production Planning & Operations Agent — runs pre-release checks and releases orders in batches with planner confirmation. The fully autonomous shop-floor agents announced at Sapphire 2026 are mostly phased through 2026, not all live today.
What it can actually do
Conversational order insights GA
Ask Joule to list production and process orders for a material, show order details, and drill into operations and components.
Production Planning & Operations Agent Beta → GA
In the Manage Production Orders app, runs an AI-guided release on up to 20 orders at once: verifies component availability, checks work-centre capacity, proposes rescheduling, and releases on your confirmation.
Shop Floor Supervisor Agent Roadmap
Part of SAP Digital Manufacturing: identifies resource breakdowns, proposes action plans, reschedules, and coordinates stock moves to alternative resources.
Change Record Management Agent GA Q2 2026
Analyses problem reports, change requests and change notices, recommends next steps, and initiates the engineering-change process.
Manufacturing Assistant Roadmap
Role-based Joule Assistant connecting shop-floor signals to operational context and orchestrating the underlying manufacturing agents.
Production Excellence & Master Data Readiness Agents Roadmap
Continuously monitor production, quality and machine signals to catch issues early and keep routings and work instructions aligned with the plan.
Honest limitations
- The headline release agent is S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition only and off by default (activated via a feature flag); the batch is capped at 20 orders.
- “Autonomous” here is supervised — the planner reviews and confirms rescheduling proposals before the agent releases anything.
- Most of the Sapphire-2026 manufacturing agents (Shop Floor Supervisor, Manufacturing Assistant, Production Excellence) are roadmap, with phased GA through 2026 — not available today.
Example prompts
- “Show me all production orders for material X and which ones aren’t ready to release.”
- “Release these production orders — check component availability and capacity first, and tell me what to reschedule if anything’s blocked.”
- “Give me the operations and component details for production order 12345.”
Not sure you're ready for this?
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