How to use a dash button with SAP S/4HANA?

What is a dash button ?

As a regular customer of Amazon services, I was waiting for the arrival of Dash Button on their website. A Dash Button is a command button that lets you add a product to an Amazon order in one click. There are declined in various ways for several products. Then you just have to fix the button to your dishwasher, your washing machine or your bathroom cabinet.

What is the relationship between SAP and maintenance notices ?

In addition to the classic buttons for ordering toothpaste, laundry and tea bags, there is one specifically designed for the IOT, the AWS IoT Button. This button, that can support about 2000 actuations, is configurable via the Amazon cloud to execute up to 3 different actions; one for a single click, one for a long clickand one for a double click.

It is therefore possible to configure a function in the Amazon cloud to call an ODATA service developed on the S/4 HANA side to create maintenance notices. We can then imagine an Amazon AWS IoT Button attached to a machine and a simple click to ask for its maintenance notice.

What architecture?

The AWS IoT Button communicates directly and only with the Amazon cloud. This requires the creation of an Amazon account to access the different services and configure the button. The communication between the button and the rest of the world is made through Lambda functions that can be developed for example in Nodejs or Python. On the SAP side, we will use an ODATA service created directly on "S/4 HANA" to create maintenance notices. 

A bit of technique

We first create a CDS View listing existing maintenance notices in the system as well as their creation date. This CDS View is then used to create an ODATA service via SEGW in "S/4 HANA" and completed with the creation of notifications via standard BAPIs. Once the service is operational, we can code the Lambda function for its call. I made the choice of NodeJS but Python could just as well do the trick. The function is created and tested directly in Amazon's Lambda service. Lastly, we need to configure the Lambda function call from the AWS IoT button via the 'Trigger' tab of the function. A click of the button now creates a maintenance notice in "S/4HANA". One could imagine using the event 'long click' or 'double click' to close a maintenance order once the technician's intervention on the machine is complete.

About monitoring

I chose to follow the creation of notifications from a KPI in a Fiori Launchpad portal enabled in SAP Cloud platform. After activating the various services in SCP (Portal, Smart Business Service), I created a cube and a query via a CDS view that I integrated via a KPI in my portal. A click of the button now creates a maintenance notice in "S/4HANA".

One could imagine using the event 'long click' or 'double click' to close a maintenance order once the technician's intervention on the machine is complete.

AWS IoT Buttons on all machines?

Perhaps not, considering the price of it but the exercise was interesting and shows the ease with which these connected devices can be integrated into our SAP environments to automate and facilitate several tasks. The arrival of SAP Leonardo will accelerate this type of initiative among our customers.