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Is the Automobile Emerging as the Fourth Screen?

Is the Automobile Emerging as the Fourth Screen?

TAKE NOTE (Insights into SAP solutions and Emerging Technology)

 

There are many observers who believe that the automobile will emerge as a “fourth screen” – behind TV, computers/tablets and smartphones.

This is in part due to the impending autonomous capability that is coming to vehicles over the next decade.

It was recently estimated that US economy could save $1.3 trillion per year once autonomous vehicles come online. This is fully eight percent of US GDP. Let me repeat… eight percent of US GDP.

That’s huge! If we extrapolate this globally, we can see that this is a revolutionary change that will impact all aspects of the value chain serviced by the automotive industry. The major contributors to this number are accident avoidance, productivity gains from not needing human drivers, congestion avoidance and fuel savings.

There’s been a lot focus about the in-car experience but that misses the point of what would be possible with this new “fourth screen.” The ability to tap into data that is unique to the car (and not something a smartphone would be aware of) could drive specific advertising and offers.

For instance, when you pull into a gas station, sensors on board the car can detect that you’ve been driving continuously for 200 miles WITH four passengers onboard — maybe they’re thirsty. Connectivity to the pump would allow contextual offers to be presented to the driver, while pumping gas, to stop into the convenience store at the gas station.

Additionally we can foresee a future where a car’s gas tank status is detected by local gas stations and offers can be created to draw the driver into a particular location. These are all made possible by technologies delivered by Internet of Things, but also the ability to create a business connection between buyer and seller based on relative location.

Join the discussion and share with me the myriad of ways you think the automotive industry can take advantage of the networked economy. If you are interested in learning more about the Networked Economy Click here.

You may also be interested in a recent report from Economist Intelligence Unit on the impact of hyper-connectivity and the automobile industry. You can download it here.

This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends

 


 

UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

SAT – How to find exact source code line of an ABAP statement

Lets pick up from last month…  After digesting the first 2 blogs in this series, you now basically have everything you need to start using the SAT transaction.  We learned how to efficiently navigate the NEW UI tools and tool-sets. We took a deeper dive into each tool to see how to use it.

So now lets look at some examples of what you might need to do at work. For instance, you may need to find the exact source code location of a particular ABAP statement (a method call, function call…). OK.. lets get started!

I am going to use the DEMO Car rental program delivered with SAP. The transaction code is /nDEMO_CR_CAR_RENTAL. When you execute this, you will be asked if you want to use the CLASSICAL or WEB Dynpro versions.  For our purposes, lets use the good old Classical Dynpro (See below)

Click the green check and Viola! Nice… brings me back to the good old days…. Anyway it should look like the one below.

The one above has some data I created before hand just for this Blog, you’ll need to do the same.

Now imagine, that our task is to add some changes to the car reservation record before it gets written into the car reservation table. We need to find out which ABAP program, (or method, function module…) writes the car reservation record into the car reservation table and where exactly in the ABAP source code this occurs.

READ MORE

 


 

Q&A (Post your questions to Facebook or Twitter and get the answers you need)

Q.  I am new to SAP, and ABAP development. I keep hearing that we use IDocs here and I am not familiar with this term. Can you explain what an IDoc is?

A. Yes, I can give you the 50,000 foot view, but then you will need to dig in and get your hands dirty to graps this.

From 50,000 feet… an IDoc (for intermediate document) is a standard data structure for electronic data interchange (EDI) between application programs written for the SAP business system or between an SAP application and an external program. IDocs serve as the vehicle for data transfer in SAP’s Application Link Enabling (ALE) system. IDocs are used for asynchronous transactions: each IDoc generated exists as a self-contained text file that can then be transmitted to the requesting partner without connecting to the central database. Another SAP mechanism, the Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) is used for synchronous transactions.

A large enterprise’s networked computing environment is likely to connect many geographically distributed computers to the main database. These computers are likely to use different hardware and/or operating system platforms.

An IDoc encapsulates data so that it can be exchanged between different systems without conversion from one format to another.

Now that you have the breadcrumbs, go get the whole loaf by reading these posts. Best of luck!

IDocs: A Guide for New Developers – Part 1

IDocs: A Guide for New Developers – Part 2

IDocs: A Guide for New Developers – Part 3

IDocs: A Guide for New Developers – Part 4

IDocs: A Guide for New Developers – Part 5

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