Article

Business system integration with IoT devices

Don’t let IoT become an island in your IT infrastructure. Integrate your existing (and future) business systems with your IoT projects to trigger automated actions driven by sensor-enabled “things.” Read on for tips for IoT system integrators.

What is IoT-business system integration?

When you implement an IoT project, you begin by connecting sensor-embedded devices to your IoT platform. As the data flows in from those IoT devices, you gain incredible insights. For example, you can receive alarms so you know when equipment is about to fail. This helps you prevent costly downtime. But what if you were to create automated actions based on an alarm from an IoT connected device? That’s where IoT-business system integration comes in.

Why integrate business systems with IoT?

By integrating your IoT solution with business applications, on-premises or in the cloud (for example SAP, Salesforce®, Microsoft® Teams, ServiceNow® and Zendesk®), you can automate actions and workflows based on IoT events. You can enrich real-time IoT device data with contextual data from other systems.

Simply put, when everything’s connected (all your systems, apps and devices), real business transformation can take place.

Gathering and analyzing data from your sensors is a great place to start with the IoT. But to maximize your ROI, you need to integrate your IoT platforms with your operational business systems.

Sample use cases

Manufacturing: Let’s say you’re a manufacturer and you want to automate parts ordering and replacement. With IoT-business system integration:

  • A sensor on a piece of equipment can detect significant wear and tear and signal the order management system to order a replacement
  • The order management system can notify the service support system that replacement equipment is ordered (with the order number) and advise when the equipment’s in and ready for installation
  • Maintenance and service management can be proactively scheduled
  • The technician gets notified automatically when it’s time to visit the plant and make the installation or conduct service

Result? Improved productivity with no downtime.

Smart product innovation: With IoT integration, you can offer products your competitors can’t. Let’s say you make window blinds with sensors linked to weather systems. When the weather system alerts the sensors to heat, the blinds can close automatically.

Benefits of business system integration with the IoT

Beecham Research surveyed 25,000 IoT adopters to discover the most common reasons why IoT projects fail and found 70% struggle to integrate IoT solutions into existing workflows. Cumulocity IoT simplifies IoT integration, enabling you to easily integrate your IoT solution with business systems, on-premises and in the cloud.

Self-service, no-coding integration
Cumulocity IoT makes it easy to integrate cloud and on-premises applications and orchestrate integrations between them. A graphical UI and integration templates (called “recipes”) enable anyone to integrate IoT data with their other enterprise systems without needing to write code.

Intuitive workflow design interface
Accelerate building your integration workflows using an interface designed for ease of use. Simply drag and drop to connect the most popular SaaS and IoT apps to orchestrate workflows easily. Start from the scratch, or use our prebuilt integration recipes.

Integration environments for developers
Can’t find the out-of-the-box connector to one of your systems? Developers will find the tools they need in Cumulocity IoT to program the integration.

SAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

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