In today’s manufacturing world, enterprises face various challenges that force them to change the way that manufacturing processes have traditionally operated in their industries.
Global competition has increased pressure on companies to excel when it comes to cost, quality, and responsiveness. The business and financial impact of production exceptions can’t be monitored or controlled at the enterprise level because of a disconnect between manufacturing plant floor processes and the enterprise. Time-to-market windows are shrinking, regulatory requirements are growing, and the ability to maximize assets and utilize the workforce seem to be top priorities for management—and these are just a few of the challenges!
Industry 4.0
To address these challenges, SAP supports a new concept based on Industry 4.0, which is called Industry4.Now. SAP’s Industry4.Now focuses on four central themes: intelligent products, intelligent factories, intelligent assets, and empowered people. SAP’s view of Industry4.Now and intelligent factories is centered on visibility, responsiveness, and direct and powerful links among the manufacturing shop floor, supply chain, external partners, and executive suite.
The two most important enablers of Industry 4.0 are manufacturing synchronization and manufacturing excellence; together, they allow your company to become an adaptive manufacturer. To achieve these concepts, you can use a composition platform to model and develop intelligent applications with ease.
In the SAP world, manufacturing synchronization is supported by SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII), allowing you to synchronize your enterprise business applications with the manufacturing shop floor applications in real time. It also offers you the performance management functionality you need on the shop floor—and ability to make the most of your manufacturing execution solution.
Let’s dive deeper into the capabilities of SAP MII.
SAP MII Capabilities
SAP MII provides bidirectional data access (both in synchronous and asynchronous modes) to enterprise and manufacturing plant floor systems. Its integration capabilities are unique: It provides specific data connectors to various standard manufacturing shop floor systems, along with seamless connectivity to SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA using standard protocols such as SAP Java Connector, ALE, OData, and web services.
The major integration components of SAP MII include data services for manufacturing shop floor connectivity, message services for enterprise connectivity, business logic services for logic orchestration and various system integration, and catalog services for manufacturing systems and data hierarchy and context management.
SAP MII can also be used as a manufacturing intelligence and analytics platform. Once the manufacturing plant floor is integrated with the enterprise, you can tap into SAP MII’s manufacturing analytics in the form of visualizations (charts, reports, KPIs, etc.) and statistical analyses (SPC, SQC, etc.). The solution’s manufacturing intelligence features include visualization services, self-service composition environment (SSCE), KPIs, manufacturing data objects (MDOs), energy monitoring, illuminator portal, and BLS.
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a standard KPI for determining the effectiveness of the machine or production line. SAP OEE Management, when used alongside SAP MII, helps you quantify and evaluate plant performance. For example, it helps you define the production line hierarchy, execute process and production orders, and capture data manually and automatically from machines and external systems—all in service of providing the OEE (and other) KPIs in real time.
About the Implementing SAP MII book
SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence is here to improve your manufacturing processes. We’ve published Implementing SAP MII to help developers and consultants learn how to use SAP MII and how to develop applications in SAP MII to adopt Industry 4.0 goals. SAP MII can be used to bridge the gap between the enterprise and the manufacturing plant floor by providing integration and intelligence services.
With this book, learn about the administration and configuration features of SAP MII with regard to installation, user management, system management, and security services. Then explore the integration aspect of SAP MII and how it can connect to different manufacturing plant floor systems (by using SAP Plant Connectivity and data servers) and enterprise systems like SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA.
The SAP MII workbench is explained in chapter four. Learn how to use it to create query templates to work with the data you receive from plant systems. You’ll also understand how to create and use an MDO as a data modeling and persistency layer for SAP MII applications.
The next chapter explains how you can use business logic service transactions to create intelligent manufacturing composites. It focuses on the modeling techniques and different action blocks you can use to process data. It also covers how to create display templates for analysis, manufacturing plant floor visualizations, SAPUI5-based web pages in the SAP MII workbench, and dashboards using the SSCE.
Explore the configuration of the plant information catalog (PIC). This will be handy for managing hierarchies of assets, machines, and production lines in a manufacturing plant, which you’ll learn how to use in integration and analysis.
The energy monitoring and analysis features are explained next, along with the configuration and use of SAP Overall Equipment Effectiveness Management (SAP OEE Management) for manufacturing execution and performance management. To close out the book, consider pro tips and advanced SAP MII development and implementations techniques.
Who Is This Book For?
This book is for consultants or developers that want to understand how to use SAP MII as a solution development platform for manufacturing system integration, execution, and analytics. SAP manufacturing consultants may also find this book useful to understand the positioning and effectiveness of SAP MII used with an ERP system for plant integration.
About the Authors
Dipankar Saha is an architect for SAP manufacturing and Industry 4.0 solutions; he has worked on several SAP MII implementation projects and on the product design and development of SAP MII. Dipankar is an SAP-certified associate enterprise architect. He has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. Dipankar has coauthored several books on SAP MII and SAP ME published by SAP PRESS, and has written a few other books and several popular technical blogs and articles on manufacturing and related topics. He regularly participates in different public forums, presenting papers and showcasing applications and solutions on topics related to SAP manufacturing and Industry 4.0.
Chandan Jash is a technical architect and SME for SAP ME and SAP MII implementation projects at IBM India. He has worked on many SAP manufacturing implementations, has supported SAP MII and SAP ME projects globally in different roles, and has implemented Industry 4.0 standards. Chandan coauthored the book on SAP ME published by SAP PRESS. He has worked with SAP solutions for more than 17 years and has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering. Chandan has also participated in the IBM internal forum and SAP community by publishing articles, providing solutions, and presenting at global SAP events.
Sudipta Mukherjee is an application architect at IBM India with more than 17 years of IT experience. His main areas of expertise are SAP MII, SAP OEE Management, SAP ME, SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, SAP BTP, and SAP Internet of Things. He works with global clients to define SAP manufacturing implementation architectures and manage end-to-end delivery. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering.
Supriya Malakar is a senior consultant at IBM India. He works with global clients for large-scale SAP MII and SAP ME solution implementation. He also has deep expertise in SAP BTP and SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud. He has more than six years of experience in the IT industry and has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering.
Abesh Bhattacharjee has been working as an IT consultant, a go-to market leader, and an architect for more than 20 years. He is currently the senior solution architect at Neptune Software responsible for North America.
How to Purchase
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