Unlock the Intelligent Enterprise with the SAP Business ByDesign and IoT Services

In this blog, I am going to showcase how SMEs running the SAP ERP Cloud – SAP Business ByDesign (ByD) can become the Intelligent Enterprises by optimizing, innovating and extending their business with the help of the SAP Business Technology Platform, particularly using the advantages of the SAP IoT Services.

First let me define, What is the Intelligent Enterprise (IE)?

The Intelligent Enterprise focuses on day-to-day business processes to remove repetitive tasks, and move your efforts to higher value activities. It gives you better tools so you can engage better with your customers, suppliers, and employees. These applications are intended to be specific, global, and as well applicable to small, large or middle-sized enterprises.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the platform for the Intelligent Enterprise (IE), where customers can achieve agility, business value, and continual innovation through integration, data to value, and extensibility of all SAP and third-party applications and data assets. Below figure can explain better:

To learn more about the SAP BTP, you might visit the SAP Discovery Center in order to get more insights about the available services plus the missions, as shown below:

To start quick on SAP BTP, you might get a free trial tenant of the SAP Business Technology Platform Cockpit, in order to learn how to create and deploy cloud apps and gain access to a comprehensive set of platform services, as shown below:

In fact, one of the significant intelligent technologies of the SAP BTP is the SAP Internet of Things (IoT) Services. The SAP IoT solution has a reference architecture that offers business services and specific capabilities to address critical industrial IoT use cases across manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, assets, products, service management, and more.

Nowadays we can all see the evolution of IoT in industry 4.0 and the importance of 5G networks for IoT.

• SAP is named a leader in worldwide industrial IoT platforms in Manufacturing by IDC’s MarketScape – Read an excerpt from the report.
• The IoT is key to digital transformation success – Read the study made by SAP-commissioned Forrester Consulting study “Accelerate Your Digital Transformation With IoT.”

As the IoT layer of SAP’s BTP, it enables users to reimagine business processes and models with embedded IoT services and data, where data enables intelligence that which in turn feeds process automation and ultimately, innovation.

Hence with SAP IoT services for SAP BTP, customers and partners can develop, customize, and operate Internet of Things business applications in the cloud, where in such apps they can seamlessly turn their sensors’ data into contextual insights.

Here you can discover more about the SAP IoT Services for BTP, as shown below:

As an example for IoT scenario in business reality, I will to demonstrate below how SAP Business ByD customers operating in the field of transportation can use the SAP IoT Services, as to improve and optimize their fleet management area by being proactive on uncertain situations during shipment delivery or similar.

In this proof of concept l am going to display an “Live IoT based tracking and monitoring dashboard” for Fleet Management purposes. This dashboard is actually an HTML web based app that is running on the SAP Cloud Platform, that can actually reads sensor data in realtime through an IoT bridge app, which uses Bluetooth to connect to a sensor of type Texas Instruments CC2650STK SensorTag and stream the sensor data such as Accelerometer, Luxometer, Humidity and Temperature on the live dashboard, as shown below:

Let’s imagine in case of a measurement abnormality on one of the sensor data related to one of the shipments (e.g. abnormal vibration in case of bumpy roads…etc), then the IoT application will react automatically and send an alert to the backend ERP – SAP Business ByD in the form of ServiceRequest related to such shipment, that in return will be handled by the responsible user in order to proactively resolve the situation and avoid unnecessary damage or loss in business.

This IoT app can either run standalone or can even be embedded inside the SAP Business ByD business area in order to facilitate the users’ daily business matters.

Thanks to help of the Mashups in SAP Business ByD, I could use the HTML Mashup feature to embed the IoT web based app directly onto the SAP Business ByD Service Request screen.

To learn more about SAP Business ByD Mashups: Mashups in SAP Business ByDesign.

More details about the complete demo are provided in the following video:

Indeed with the help of SAP IoT Services, customers can indeed unlock the IE by embedding real-time telemetry data into new and existing Business Processes in the cloud.

To conclude, The SAP Business Technology Platform empowers customers to become an intelligent enterprise through integration, extension, and data-to-value from all SAP and third-party application and data assets, while ensuring our customers’ long-term success through agility, value-creation and continual innovation.

I strongly recommend to go through my previous blog for How can you expand your business with SAP Business Technology Platform? in order to get more understanding on the how to use SAP BTP Integration capabilities through the SAP Integration suite with either the SAP Business ByD or S/4HANA Cloud.

To learn more about SAP IoT Services based on BTP for SMEs:

• IoT Made Simple with SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign
• SAP IoT for SMBs
• SMB.io: IoT mobile app prototype
• Loosely Coupled Solutions for SMBs Topics