German alliance to build adaptable business process from Internet of Things

Calling themselves the Alliance Digital Product Flow, the team includes its coordinator, SAP, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Fraunhofer Institute, IDS Scheer, Software, the Technical University of Darmstadt, and the Institute for Applied Computer Science at the Technical University of Dresden – with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to the tune of 17.7 million euros. “With the Internet of Services, Germany has the opportunity to play a leading role in developing the future Internet and its applications,” says parliamentary state secretary Andreas Storm, of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. So far, explains the team, Internet technologies have been used to identify objects and to automate data entry for individual process steps – such as goods receipt or issue. The intention is to harness the methods and tools researched by the alliance to record and analyse all events that take place in an object in a structured way, so as to plan, manage and optimise the entire business process sequence – including goods and information flow – automatically. SAP says that during the research, application scenarios will undergo feasibility testing in the retail, logistics and mechanical engineering to ensure cross-industry applicability, a high degree of reusability and “a strong economic benefit”. In the area of transportation In mechanical and plant engineering, the aim is to develop solutions that identify changing customer requirements and adjust maintenance services dynamically.