Smart Carrier - data driven future logistics networks with IoT and SAP Fiori UX

[dries_guth]

In this blog post, I would like to draw your attention to the SAP Fiori Makers Call this thursday, March 8. We as itelligence are a member of the SAP Fiori Makers Club and present in this call a concrete use case of the Smart Carrier project with a review by the Chief Designer for SAP Fiori: Kai Richter. The Fiori Makers focus is on UX and Fiori Design and their use in real projects.

More information can be found here: Next Fiori Makers Call - March 8

A short introduction to the solution

Nowadays, any asset, vehicle, or package can be connected to the internet, which enables new data-driven delivery concepts. One example is real-time temperature monitoring in the pharmaceuticals industry, where it is crucial to protect temperature-sensitive drugs and vaccines during shipment. Or in the manufacturing industry, where GPS-based asset tracking is used between different production locations to enable just-in-time assembly and ensure real-time supply chain processes. These kinds of scenarios are driven by data from the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, geolocation data, parcel and delivery data, or even contextual data, such as weather conditions.



The new Parcel Tracking Cockpit extends current features of our own IP solution it.x-press with track & trace functionality and real-time IoT sensor data. Within the architecture we integrated given business process Data from SAP ERP and combined that data with IoT Sensor Data we're getting from a Senor device manufacture. The implementation has been achieved by a multi-cloud API integration of the Sensor IoT Cloud with SAP Cloud Platform Services we have implemented. On top of it we implemented two first Fiori based apps for specific personas running the business process.

The open architecture uses the widely adopted Cloud Foundry model, OData API to integrate IoT Sensors and SAP Fiori UI elements for the smart Parcel Tracking Cockpit.

Design Thinking 

In a Design Thinking workshop with industry experts, development architects and customers we created several personas which might be involved in the overall business process. This user-centric approach helped us to identify the problems with our first prototype and how we could improve the user experience to reach its goals within a few steps in our application.

Fiori and Mockups

The highest priority for our customer was, that the application should run on the SAP Cloud Platform. Therefore we followed the Fiori Guidelines because the user is already familiar with the look and feel of such applications and we don’t want him to feel uncomfortable with our application in his known environment. For our first high fidelity mockups, we used Axure and the Fiori Design Stencils.

In the Fiori Makers call on March 8 2018 you will get insights into the Key-User Parcel Tracking application and we'll show how the integration of IoT Sensor data with business process data coming from SAP ERP backends. In the webinar, my colleagues will also show the overall Smart Carrier architecture and go into details about the challenges regarding the Fiori implementation.

If you have questions please don't hesitate to contact me directly or send me a PN.

Best regards,

Dries Guth
Product Owner Smart Carrier
Innovation Manager IoT