SAP Smart Sensing

What Is Smart Sensing?

Sensors have been used in industry for decades to capture specific parameters like temperature. Smart sensors are an evolution of legacy sensors and leverage recent advances in technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud. Unlike a traditional sensor, a smart sensor can perform advanced tasks such as data conversion, data processing, analytics, and communicating with external devices and the cloud. Many smart sensors can do self-assessment and self-calibration, making them an essential part of digital twins. The data from smart sensors can be leveraged for a plethora of applications, like predictive planning.

What Is Smart Sensing?

Sensors have been used in industry for decades to capture specific parameters like temperature. Smart sensors are an evolution of legacy sensors and leverage recent advances in technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud. Unlike a traditional sensor, a smart sensor can perform advanced tasks such as data conversion, data processing, analytics, and communicating with external devices and the cloud. Many smart sensors can do self-assessment and self-calibration, making them an essential part of digital twins. The data from smart sensors can be leveraged for a plethora of applications, like predictive planning.

What Is SAP Smart Sensing?

Smart sensing is a capability within the SAP Internet of Things offering that leverages SAP Fiori to identify and track physical objects maintained in SAP S/4HANA. The identification and tracking is done primarily by scanners and smart sensors. Compared to classic IoT scenarios, the SAP smart sensing approach brings the following advantages:

• Tracking of single events rather than recording of continuous data streams significantly reduces the amount of data to process.
• Using auto-ID tags instead of sensors reduces costs.
• Tagging of single items that are part of a delivery or a handling unit allows for a finer granularity and higher precision of the data collected.

While the applications can span multiple functions, a key function that can leverage smart sensing extensively is supply chain. With the help of smart sensors and other technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, organizations can build smart, kinetic supply chains, as highlighted in this webinar.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

SAP smart sensing is a robust capability to help organizations build components of the intelligent enterprise. However, there are certain key aspects that SAPinsiders need to keep in perspective when embarking on this journey:

Understand the difference between conventional and smart sensors. As mentioned earlier, sensors have been used in industry for a while, but smart sensors take this capability much further. Understanding the “smart” aspect of sensors will allow you to understand where and how to use them.

Think beyond just tracking. While there is no doubt that smart sensors can help track flows or processes in real time, the data often captured by these sensors can be used extensively for generating additional insights. Key advanced analytics approaches like simulation, optimization, and predictive analytics can be leveraged using this data to generate new insights for organizations.

Think end-to-end. A powerful capability of smart sensors is that they can be used to build end-to-end solutions, specifically in process intense functions like supply chains. You can design end-to-end solutions to make your enterprise more resilient and agile.