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?

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.

- SAP S/4HANA
cbs Pushes APAC Enterprises Beyond SAP S/4HANA Go-Live With Post-Migration Roadmap

Published: 13/June/2026

Reading time: 3 mins

cbs Corporate Business Solutions argues that SAP S/4HANA go-live is only the foundation for APAC transformation. Manual finance consolidation, fragmented inventory data, and stalled AI pilots show where post-migration capability work still needs to happen.
5 Steps to Lower Your IT Costs

Published: 06/December/2010

Reading time: 9 mins

ManagementEvery IT manager is under pressure to deliver within ever-tightening budgets. But how? Cindy Rasey, a practice manager at Symmetry Corporation, follows a five-step plan that can help you lower your IT organization’s operational costs. In these days of tighter budgets, any financial cut backs across the business can improve the bottom line and please...…
Avoid Losing Valuable Sales and Customer Data by Using Backup and Recovery in Depth

Published: 15/April/2010

Reading time: 12 mins

Find out why multiple, in-depth layers of recovery parameters are more effective than a single layer when backing up and recovering SAP CRM data, business processes, and event logs. Key Concept Backup and recovery in depth refers to the strategy of creating multiple layers of recovery parameters (rather than a single layer) to better back...…
An Overview of Version 2 of SAP’s Customer Financial Fact Sheet Mobile App

Published: 27/June/2012

Reading time: 9 mins

/MobileDiscover the four main steps within version 2 of SAP’s Customer Financial Fact Sheet, a mobile application for finance teams: review a customer list, analyze the customer, review invoices, and record an action. Key Concept Version 2 of SAP’s Customer Financial Fact Sheet enables you to view a customer’s account records that pertain to sales...…
Expect SAP NetWeaver BW to Run Soon on SAP HANA

Published: 31/January/2012

Reading time: 4 mins

Beyond its touted ability to accelerate the speed of information analysis, SAP HANA is evolving into other uses, including as a replacement for the traditional relational databases that SAP NetWeaver BW typically runs on top of. Right now, you might think of SAP HANA as a means to speed up information analysis — but by...…
- SAP HANA Studio
SAP HANA Studio-Based Modeling of BW Objects Without Transaction Code RSA1

Published: 16/June/2014

Reading time: 10 mins

Learn the steps needed to set up an SAP HANA studio user interface to access some of the BW modeling tasks normally done in BW transaction code RSA1. As SAP HANA and BW modelers merge and overlap tasks, the ability to model windows into each type of modelers’ worlds becomes more and more important. Key...…
Leveraging SAP HANA to Enhance SAP Business Planning and Consolidation’s Capabilities

Published: 15/October/2014

Reading time: 25 mins

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) 10.1, along with its host environments (SAP Business Warehouse [SAP BW] and SAP HANA) provide abundant design choices to meet today’s business planning needs. See a comparison between the various models available in BPC to facilitate appropriate model selection based on business priorities. The potential to enhance BPC capabilities...…
- SAP Cloud Migration
Learn How to Work With SAP HANA Cloud Portal Themes

Published: 16/February/2015

Reading time: 11 mins

Ameya Pimpalgaonkar shows how SAP HANA Cloud Portal themes differ from traditional portal themes. HANA Cloud Portal themes are delivered as a Leaner Cascading Style Sheet (LESS) file. Key Concept Leaner Cascading Style Sheets (LESS) is a programmable stylesheet language that extends Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It extends CSS by combining programming concepts of variables,...…
- SAP HANA
The Future of SAP BW: SAP BW 7.5, Edition for SAP HANA

Published: 15/March/2016

Reading time: 20 mins

Learn about the newest SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SAP BW 7.5, edition for SAP HANA, and the differences between it and a normal SAP BW-powered by SAP HANA system or SAP BW running on any other database. Key Concept The newest version of SAP BW, BW 7.5, edition for SAP HANA, is slightly different than...…
- SAP GRC
Seamlessly Activate and Deploy SAP Fiori 1.0 for SAP Solutions for GRC

Published: 24/February/2017

Reading time: 17 mins

Understand the technical architectural design, setup, and implementation of SAP Fiori in the SAP GRC environment as it relates to SAP Access Control, SAP Risk Management, and SAP Process Control applications. SAP Fiori provides a friendlier and intuitive user interface to access these SAP applications. Key Concept SAP Fiori for SAP solutions for GRC is...…