www.sap.com

From Walldorf to Wall Street: The SAP Success Story:

Founded in 1972 as Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing, SAP is the recognized leader in providing collaborative business solutions for all types of industries and for every major market.

Serving more than 36,200 customers worldwide, SAP is the world's largest business software company and the world's third-largest independent software provider overall. SAP has a rich history of innovation and growth that has made us a true industry leader. Today, SAP employs more than 38,400 people in more than 50 countries. SAP professionals are dedicated to providing the highest level of customer service and support.


SAP Research: Systematic Thought Leadership for Innovative Business

SAP Research is the research department of SAP, significantly contributing to SAP's product portfolio by identifying breakthrough innovation and conducting co-innovation with external partners and customers. SAP Research acts as SAP's IT trend scout, identifying emerging IT trends, researching and developing in strategically important SAP business areas, and leveraging entrepreneurial inventive talent.

Our Research Team:

Automatic Identification: Increasing Quality, Timeliness, and Depth of Information with RFID:

Our Research Team focuses on the Auto-ID Technology for the next generation of SAP's Web Application Platform "NextWeaver". Automatic identification(Auto-ID) refers to a host of technologies that help machines to identify objects. Today, bar codes are the most widely used auto-id technology. But bar codes have certain disadvantages. They require direct line of sight and each item needs to be scanned individually. Only the product group to which an item belongs can be identified, not the individual items themselves. In order to solve these problems and to improve processes, more recent auto-id technologies have evolved.

Identifying the item to which the RFID tag is attached:

Today, the most prominent automatic identification technology is radio frequency identification (RFID), which identifies and tracks goods by means of radio signals. This technology is used to improve business processes such as supply chain execution or enterprise asset management. RFID is the key enabling technology for Smart Items and the SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure component of the SAP NetWeaver platform. RFID tags not only make production, transport, storage, and maintenance more efficient, they also prevent shortages and increase delivery reliability and customer satisfaction.

SAP is a driving force in developing RFID technology and applications. Drawing upon experience from several years of applied research as well as from successful pilot projects with leading companies such as Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Fraport, and the Metro Group, SAP Research initiated developing the SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure, a layer that handles RFID data in the context of actual applications.

Dynamic Information Visualization for Auto-ID Technology:

Scientific- (or data-), and Information visualization are branches of computer graphics which are concerned with the presentation of interactive or animated digital images to users to understand data. For example, scientists interpret potentially huge quantities of laboratory or simulation data or the results from sensors out in the field to aid reasoning, hypothesis building and cognition. This conveys in a nutshell how an Auto-ID Technology can take advantage of Information Visualization.

We are currently working on developing a research prototype with an interactive data-driven animation that will simulate the entire Supply-Chain process of a Manufacturer. This is a real time animation that simulates the actual landscape of an Industry. Some of the challenging factors involved in this visualization are: Large data volume, data with lower granular locations, data incomplete, providing real time datas, simulation, data are in multiple layers and connected cross layers. Our goal is to successfully accomplish these issues and keep track of "All" the physical objects that are floating across the Supply-Chain process of a Manufacturer and automate the Business Process. This visualization framework will be tied up with the next generation of SAP's Web Application Platform "NextWeaver".


My Research work and Abstract of Master's Thesis:

Business applications are generating ever-increasing amounts of data, and more and more of this data is moving in real-time. Data mining is a standard feature in some databases for retrieving complex information but the challenge is about how to represent these information in an effective way for better analysis and decision making. With this rich information, the challenge still remains to derive the most business value from ever-increasing amount of available information. Information visualization can significantly solve this problem for handling such complex and high volumes of data to be represented in business applications. Through this research, an attempt will be made to solve this problem by prototyping an interactive data driven business application through visualization. The key focus of this research work will be given in the “Presentation Tier” of a business application for visually representing the information in an aesthetic manner for better understanding.

Master's Thesis: (7.4 MB)

Prototype Development update as of Jan 21, 2008:

1. A web-based Supply Chain Application for a Manufacturer is developed with "Web 2.0" Technologies.

2. A dynamic Map Visualization tool is created on top of Yahoo! Maps for simulating the Supply Chain process of a Manufacturer.

3. A Visualization Framework is created for connecting this application with SAP's NextWeaver.



My Presentations:

Phase I: Viz. Framework | SAP Research, CA | Download PPT (4 MB)

Phase II: SAP's XCarrier Problem | RIT, NY | N/A



Technology:

Our (web)application consists of a three-layered Supply-Chain network which are built based on the components of the latest and the greatest "Web 2.0" Technology:

Client-Side: AJAX, JavaScript, Flash, ActionScript, XHTML, XML, XSL, CSS & JSP.

Server-Side: J2EE & Java Servlets.

Database: SQL Server 2005.

Application Server: Sun Java Application Server.

IDE: Sun Java Studio Creator.

Web Services: Yahoo! Maps.

Event Processing Engine: Coral8.

SAP System: NetWeaver (Auto-ID Infrastructure & mySAP ERP).

Sample Screenshots of our Application: