ERP system and Internet of Things

In recent years, many ERP systems have competed each other by trying to provide the best solution for improving the business. After introducing cloud-based platform i.e. SAP HANA, Oracle ERP Cloud, Microsoft Dynamic cloud ERP and so on, they tried to seek for other new technologies to support the organisation. However, this article will only focus on SAP solution. While the user of internet has dramatically grown every year, and devices has become more and more intelligent. From SAP’s research, they found that the number of connected devices through the internet would be more than fifty billion by 2020. They expected that many physical objects would be able to communicate via the internet. The internet of things (IoT) can be defined as the integration of several technologies such as RFID, sensor, actuators, and wireless network (Atzori, Iera and Morabito, 2010).

 As last few year ago, SAP introduced an additional solution (IoT connector solution) which can use to connect sensor-based data with SAP HANA platform. This solution will combine data from automation devices and smart devices to perform a better retrospective and predictive analysis. Moreover, there are several benefits that the organisation can gain from these technologies solution.

• Improve efficiency, sustainability, quality, and safety
• Increase decision-making performance
• Improve decentralised data consistency
• Reduce operation cost
• Simplify software integration

Although, this solution may not be suitable for every business, there are some businesses can use it to improve their processes such as manufacturing, supply chain integrity, energy, health service and so on. But, they still have some major technical issues that require to consider. For example, Internet scalability, identification and addressing of the network, heterogeneity technologies (Haller, Karnouskos and Schroth, 2008).

Atzori, L., Iera, A. and Morabito, G. (2010). The Internet of Things: A survey. Computer Networks, 54(15), pp.2787-2805.

Haller, S., Karnouskos, S. and Schroth, C. (2008). The Internet of Things in an Enterprise Context. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp.14-28.

SAP. (2016). IoT Platform | Internet of Things Applications | SAP HANA. [online] Available at: http://go.sap.com/product/technology-platform/iot-platform-cloud.html.

Chompassorn Pholtanasak (1465063)

: 28 Mar 2016 15:08 |  Tags: Cloud Erp Erp Systems Integration |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem