What is SAP MII?

Operational excellence is the key to business success. And at the heart of operational excellence is the real “thing”, Manufacturing Systems. Mastering the shopfloor control is a key concern for plants and other production facilities.

But production shopfloor management is never as straightforward in real life as it is on paper. From materials management and machine breakdowns to sick calls and on-the-job injuries, countless variables impact the output, speed, and overall efficiency of a working factory.

SAP MII is a system among SAP Manufacturing Solutions. It is one of the key components in the field of digital transformation, the Internet of Things, and Industry 4.0. It is designed to increase the operational efficiency of companies. In this article, the first in a series, I will explain what SAP MII is and help you decide whether it is suitable for your production processes.

What is SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence)?

SAP MII is the solution developed and placed into the market by SAP to help manufacturing companies dramatically improve their manufacturing processes and performance. It focuses on integrating the manufacturing processes of enterprises and improving production operations with real-time data analyses. It enables to deriving value from IIoT by connecting 4M (material, method, machine, and human) in production to an extended supply chain. 

An integration system like SAP MII is the main component on the shopfloor, helping you to address the challenges of manufacturing processes, by combining real time production data collection with centralized control, coordination, planning and automation of all participating manufacturing processes. Provides the manufacturing intelligence and visibility that businesses need.  Seamlessly integrates manufacturing and process control. SAP MII is the most important part of the SAP Manufacturing Suite and is the market-leading manufacturing integration system.

SAP MII helps you to link your manufacturing processes with business operations, reduce maintenance and investment costs, increase operator and machine/equipment efficiency, and clearly analyze weak processes and problems in your supply chain.

As an innovative solution designed specifically to support also Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES –> SAP ME), SAP MII collects data from your shopfloor operations without the need for plant floor engineering services. It gives your decision makers a single view of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) by delivering real-time information across multiple levels of your operations—from the shopfloor, through to the enterprise all the way to suppliers and customers. SAP MII can also help you extend MES capabilities without high up-front investments or significant changes in your existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system.

Using SAP MII, data from different systems can be integrated with data from other business systems. This integration provides deep insights into the measures from SAP ERP down to the shop floor, and across shopfloor operations and applications. These insights aid in decision making regarding equipment usage and shifting production priorities and also ensures necessary actions to be executed automatically or manually. It also minimizes downtimes in manufacturing processes.

Features of SAP MII

The basic and most important features of SAP MII are as follows:

• Plant Information Catalog: Used to hold master data, integrate information from different users and organize floor assets hierarchically.
• Energy Monitoring: Within the plant information catalog, it provides monitoring analytics on the energy used at different touch points.
• Manufacturing Intelligence Analytics: Supports cross-data store analysis, statistical process control, big data storage, and predictive analytics.
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Management: Analyses plant performance with historical and real-time data.
• Business Process Integration: Enables the creation of intelligent business processes from business to production to all areas of a company. integration can be created between specific devices (control systems, mobile input devices, terminals, etc.).

How does SAP MII work?

SAP MII works using web standards to integrate integration components and SAP ERP applications with plant floor applications. It utilizes web server technologies to receive and integrate data from multiple sources. For example, XML can be used in combination with the Java programming language to include CRM with plant floor applications in a consistent UI.

Running on the Hana in-memory database and paired with SAP Plant Connectivity software, SAP MII provides broad visibility into production processes.

Implementing SAP MII displays KPIs and alerts through visualization tools and dashboards, thus providing real-time analyses of production operations. Thanks to these features, decision-makers can make much more informed decisions.

In addition, SAP MII is part of the Industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. This integrates production for maximum supply chain management, making it possible to work in multiple plants or in a single plant.

Benefits of SAP MII (SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence)

Integration, connectivity, and most important, context-sensitive production information are the keys to successful Industry 4.0 initiatives. SAP MII is the perfect solution to integrate various applications, equipment and sensors and connect that information to shop floor personnel. SAP MII natively integrates the shop floor with your SAP ERP business systems in real-time, among others, with SAP EWM, SAP PP, SAP QM, SAP PM, SAP EWM/MFS, SAP ME and SAP PI. Besides integration capabilities with 3rd-Party solutions (Non-SAP), SAP MII provides services to structure, distribute and provide context to manufacturing data through data collection/integration, dashboarding and analytics capabilities. Dashboarding and analytics enable manufacturing personnel to visualize and leverage accurate and timely data for critical decision-making.

SAP MII solutions become the central component and orchestrator for data-driven, evidence-based decision making. SAP MII extracts and processes data from all critical business systems and displays integrated data to key stakeholders and decision makers. For instance, SAP MII can be used to view, collect, measure, and compare the performance of plants and assets with different automation system infrastructures. To enable more valuable information, SAP PCo (SAP Plant Connectivity) can be used to connect shop floor equipment for the purposes of data collection and evaluation.

As an advanced shop floor integration system, SAP MII also assists you with proactive production floor management. Using historical data, managers can establish gold standard parameters for your factory’s unique environment. Your systems can then be programmed to issue alerts when certain parameters fall below expected levels. Data fluctuations indicate there are likely problems in those areas, even if they are still too new to have a measurable impact on production. If your team remains ready to respond as soon as an alert is raised, you can stay one step ahead of most common production problems. Real-time data tracking

provides instant, continuous, and omnipresent visibility into your factory’s operations, no matter what is happening on the floor.

Over time, you see results:

• Labor is used more efficiently,
• Machine availability is maximized,
• Machine breakdowns occur less frequently,
• Materials waste is minimized,
• Production cycle times are kept consistently low.

All of these improvements eventually lead to a much higher OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness through SAP OEE), arguably the most important of all factory KPIs

With SAP MII, you can:

• Streamline business processes by incorporating all related important information from SAP and Non-SAP systems,
• Get better visibility across all levels of your organization, through transparency on the shopfloor, therefore gain complete transparency over all production states,
• Drive down costs by leveraging existing investments in plant automation software, PLCs, SCADA and industrial Historians, with flexible tools for controlling and optimizing your manufacturing processes,
• Leverage existing shop floor systems, thereby reducing maintenance and investment costs,
• Integrate manufacturing operations with core business processes like quality management, materials management, warehouse operations, production planning, sales and distribution, and make decisions based on real-time analyses and forecasts,
• Improve equipment and operator efficiency by enabling new levels of mobility on the factory floor,
• Monitor overall and machine/line-specific performance information in real-time using KPIs, dashboards, reports and alerts.

SAP MII, SAP PCo & SAP ME Consultancy

MDP Group supports businesses to increase their efficiency in their production processes and supply chain operations with SAP MII & SAP ME experts in different sectors. Time to act; just contact us to increase your efficiency in your production processes!

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