The AwareGoods
project started in autumn 1999 and was finished 2001. In this project
sensor technology augmented the supply chain. Supplier and receiver of
a delivery agree on a contract describing the conditions of the
transport. While those conditions can be guaranteed easily on the
supplier or receiver site, there is no instance to check them when the
goods are in transit. So, the primary domain of this project is
the supply chain between supplier and storage house respective the
receiver of a delivery. In this stage of the process there is a lack of
accurate, continous data about the goods to deliver. Data we were
interested in were for instance temperature gradient of fluids.
Existing
approaches measure certain environmental conditions using analog
technology. Transfering those measurements in ERP systems to decide
about a contract violation is complex and error prone. This project
aims to support this stage of the supply chain by using small sensor
hardware able to perform an automatic download of measured data at the
receiver site into ERP systems.
The MINIDAN is a little cube about 2cm x 2cm x 2cm. It has a IR interface(IrDA), a temperature sensor (but it can also have an accel sensor), a little processor and a 32KB memory which can contain up to 32.000 measurement data.
In this project I have written a C++ program
under WinNT 4.0 for communication with the MINIDAN developed by
Esys. The C++ program reads out the data and
convert it in human readable format (e.g. HTML). It can save the data in
various way such like in files or it can send it over the network. Both
output format and output target can be changed easily, because the software
is very modular.
The software
provided further an interface to the SAP business conntector. This
enabled the transfer of the data directly into SAP's ERP system. This
system could then conclude on the integrity of the delivery contract.
After presentation of the first version, the project was continued as a master thesis by Anke Thede.
Photos of the SAPCube on the CeBIT2000 can be seen below. The SAP collaborators were Christian Merz and Axel Spriestersbach.
The Minidan cube
The Minidan cube at "mysap.com's mobile world" area at the CeBIT 2000
