BeaconsOne – A Smart Shop with IoT, B1 and SAP Cloud Platform

If you attended any of the 2017 SMB Summits (Berlin, Macau or Fort Lauderdale) you should have seen a Beacons demo we presented as a proof of concept integrating SAP Business One business data and Beacons devices. We developed this proof of concept as a collaboration project inside our SAP Business One Solution Architects team and demonstrated it in one of the keynotes.

Watch this quick showcase.

I’ll like to share in this blog the details behind the demo so you can implement this proof of concept in your own system for demo or even product implementation purposes.

Heatmap showing customers in the shop

Features

• Customers entering the shop receive personalized welcome offers.
  • As soon as a customer enters the shop offers are calculated based on the SAP Business One customer orders history – B1H Predictive Analysis.

• Customers, based on their behavior in the shop, receive personalized recommendation.
  • If a user expends a certain amount of time in a specific location offers will be sent based not only on the SAP Business One orders history (B1H Predictive Analysis) but also on the location of the customer.
  • Think about a customer roaming around the Wine sector of our shop. We assume he is into wine, but have not bought anything, so we send him a personalized wine offer.

• Frictionless customer experience
  • Customers are able to place orders directly from their phones. And create sales order in B1.
• The shop manager monitors customers location inside the shop.
  • Show customers location in the shop on a HeatMap.
• Complete loosely coupled application.
  • Business One is vanilla with no customization
  • The app is hosted on a public cloud, separated from B1 cloud
  • The interaction between these two is done by B1 Service Layer

Architecture

• SAP Business One is running in SAP Business One Cloud Deployment Service (B1 CDS). This cloud is managed by SAP and your customers can directly access B1 running on the SAP cloud.

• All our specific server side development is running on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP).
  • We made this choice to keep B1 CDS standard installation handling SAP Business One business data and processes.
  • We are leveraging SCP services such as IoT, Mobile and Database

• We developed our mobile application on iOS platform based on a sample provided by Ubudu Beacons.
  • You can find more samples on other platforms in their web site.
  • Choosing other iBeacon devices can imply different behavior on your mobile application.

In details, the XS app architecture:

Technologies

• iBeacons
• iOS Mobile development
  • xCode
  • Objective C
• SAP Cloud Platform
• HANA XS engine
• HeatMap – based on https://www.patrick-wied.at/static/heatmapjs/
• B1 CDS (S-Number required)
  • Service Layer
  • B1H Predictive Analysis

Mobile app with offers notification:

Implementation

Check our video explaining the technical insights of the demo prototype as well as the detailed presentation describing each one of the components.

Source code

The source code of this proof of concept has been divided in the following modules:

• Server side business logic – HANA XS application
• HeatMap – HANA XS application
• iOS mobile application – xCode Objective C application

The full source code of the application is available on GitHub

We are currently working to enhance the documentation of each component.

Important Note: This is not an SAP Business One feature and it is not part of the product. As a consequence there is no official SAP support for this implementation. This is simply a proof of concept that you can take as is for free and develop further for your own customers.

DIY!

It was a great team effort put all this pieces together and have it available to you, SAP Partners, to try it. We really appreciate feedbacks! Leave them in the comment session below.

blog originally written by Trinidad (the B1 Queen????????) with contributions from this humble servant