Last updated: The real deal: How edge and IoT technologies boost business

The real deal: How edge and IoT technologies boost business

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What a year it’s been! In response to the pandemic, we now have so many people working remotely, conducting touch-less transactions, and getting goods and services – all without encountering another human being.

Powerful, complex computing technologies are getting things done – even when no people are around.

How is this happening?

Most of the credit goes to the growing use of edge computing, which positions compute power and data storage closer to where it’s actually needed, at the network’s “edge.” That improves accuracy, response times, and throughput.

Another piece of the puzzle: using Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect and share data from a network of sensors and software. These “things” connect to the Internet, other systems, and each other, allowing massive information exchanges to happen almost instantly.

It sounds like a lot of tech buzzwords, but the results couldn’t be any more straightforward: Companies that are willing to imaginatively deploy edge technologies and Internet of Things solutions are gaining valuable benefits.

I recently sat down to talk about edge computing and the IoT with Elvira Wallis, Senior Vice President and Global Head of IoT at SAP. As part of our new SAP Global Influencer Marketing LinkedIn Live series, “Tech Unknown: Stories from the Inside”, she shared with me some great stories about the use of this technology at companies across the globe.

What does “doing business at the edge” mean? 

Wallis generously offered up a number of real-world examples of how enterprises are using edge and IoT technologies.

First, she says, think about ships.

Around the world, shipping companies are transporting products, with vessels traveling the high seas seven or eight months of the year. Each ship is a world of its own, where people work, purchase goods, and conduct their finances.

How can they do that from the middle of the ocean?

One Greek shipping company uses SAP Edge Services to run more than 100 ships.

The services allow workers on the ship access to:

  1. Purchasing
  2. Requisitions
  3. Cash advances
  4. Human resources transactions

“That’s the edge for you – the edge is the ship,” Wallis explains. “With these services, it’s become completely normal to run their business while the ships are out at sea. People can still buy things and pay for things, and the company can pay its people, all while floating over the ocean.”

IoT and the edge: Preventing outages with real-time equipment insight

Utilities are using edge and IoT technologies to improve customer service.

Hoping to enhance customer loyalty by delivering better service, one energy production company in Italy looked for ways to increase the uptime of its equipment.

“Instead of calling service technicians to deal with outages, this utility decided to prevent them,” says Wallis. “Using edge and IoT services from SAP, the company began collecting data at the edge, which is wherever assets run.”

Then the company went one step further: by using predictive maintenance software, the utility scores the health of its assets. “An asset can be more or less healthy,” she states. “We provide that information right on the shop floor and also on dashboards, which users can access remotely.”

In fact, no human workers need to be on the shop floor to get insight into the asset health information. But as soon as a problem is spotted, technicians can perform preventative maintenance – avoiding downtime and creating happier customers.

“Real-world IoT information about the asset, the product, the worker, and the shop floor matters,” she continues. “Otherwise you’re just ‘guess-timating.’ And all of your planning is better when it’s married to real-world data like IoT data. Then you can constantly baseline yourself against what is happening in reality.”

Knowing what you need to serve customers

The value of these new technologies is indisputable. For example, one American manufacturer of packaging machines is using edge technologies and IoT data to change its business model to a more lucrative pay-per-use service.

“The company uses edge services to gather data about the health of the packing machine, wherever the machine is deployed, which is often at their customers’ sites,” says Wallis. “They also bring the information about the health of the machine to the cloud.”

When a machine needs maintenance, the system notifies the company’s service technicians, who can be sure to bring the right spare part to the customer site. That makes the technicians more productive and keeps the equipment running at peak performance, which pleases customers.

The company also benefits by improving replenishment of the foam packing materials. “To have the foam available just in time helps increase machine uptime,” she adds. “You don’t just go to the customer site with a random amount of replenishment material. You take the amount you know that you need. Having visibility into what’s going on at a particular plant helps the business work more efficiently and profitably.”

Benefitting from the edge and IoT expertise

To wrap up our conversation and this fascinating series, I asked Wallis why companies interested in edge computing and IoT should work with SAP. She didn’t hesitate.

“The strength of SAP is that we are the world market leader in application software, so we understand business processes very well,” she explains. “By enabling these business processes with IoT capabilities out-of-the-box, we offer customers a huge head start.”

SAP also can help companies extend their customized processes, create new processes that are IoT-enabled, and integrate these processes with the rest of their business.

“When it comes to processing business processes at the edge, SAP is clearly spot on,” Wallis concludes. “We can bring together the cloud and the edge to work seamlessly together. And it’s the customer’s choice, which processes to run at the edge, or parts thereof, and which to run in the cloud. I can think of many reasons why customers should choose SAP. I can’t think of any reasons why they shouldn’t.”

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