As the IoT paradigm continues to expand, physical devices are integrated with actuators and sensors to connect the digital world. It makes sense to combine IoT with business process management (BPM), creating sensor-aware business processes.In 2020, the number of IoT devices spanned 8.74 billion. Intelligent devices have transformed work and personal life. Advanced sensors also create new business models. Further, IoT devices can generate tremendous amounts of data. Processing this data requires automation. There aren’t enough hours in the day to process and analyze big data manually. In addition, it’s crucial to ensure data privacy, cyber security, and scalability of your sensor-aware business processes. Still, IoT devices should integrate in a way that is relevant to how your organization works. According to the IDC, IoT data is expected to reach 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025.If your business processes help your organization achieve its objectives, IoT functionality can bridge the physical with the digital to create sensor-aware business processes. Thus, your processes may need to integrate with multiple IoT devices depending on the purpose of the activities. You can then orchestrate your business processes to serve your organizational objectives.
Why are sensor-aware business processes essential?
In many cases, the world of BPM and IoT concepts is still largely disconnected. Yet, the digital age demands a frictionless integration of the physical business world with digital process steps and workflows. IoT is the connection, the bridge, if you will. Nonetheless, you still have to map BPM and IoT directly to create a standardized system for implementation. Only then can your business processes genuinely represent the data that comes with IoT uniformly and consistently.
Integrate your systems
Most ERP systems are designed to depict and execute business processes with human input. On the other hand, IoT brings hundreds of thousands of devices into a spider-like structure that can deploy various aspects of your business processes while reacting rapidly to new changes in your environment.To manifest the potential of evolving the business life cycle is to integrate IoT into an existing BPM environment with automated and non-automated processes. When you look at ERP systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), you might imagine a process aligning with a task-driven by a service. In contrast, IoT evokes a specific class of services called IoT services that utilize sensors and actuators from devices and the software foundation on IoT devices. All processes relevant to IoT data can become sensor-aware business processes. To clarify, it’s critical to enhance your business processes with direct IoT integration to help induce widespread adoption similar in structure to an online web. Also, it’s critical to note that you can have a set of non-IoT and IoT processes executed simultaneously.The primary goal is to create a defined interface between your business process design, implementation, and deployment. Your sensor-aware business processes need to have the agility to manage every potential IoT scenario.
