Integrating Smart Items with Business Processes An Experience Report

Smart item technologies, like RFID and sensor networks, are considered to be the next big step in business process automation. Through automatic and real-time data acquisition, these technologies can benefit a great variety of industries by improving the efficiency of their operations. SAP´s Auto-ID infrastructure enables the integration of RFID and sensor technologies with existing business processes. In this paper we give an overview of the existing infrastructure, discuss lessons learned from successful customer pilots, and point out some of the open research issues.