SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) support organizations, to perform a higher transparency within their manufacturing organization and furthermore to better organize and to control manufacturing processes more exactly (e.g. robotic controls in production areas or packaging machines).

MES system applications develop their full impact when directly linked with the respective SAP ERP systems. Not till then, strategic management decisions can be communicated quickly to the production shop floor and can be transacted trans-sectoral and cross-plant.

Thus, data services integrated within SAP MII represent the core for a perfect synchronization of production areas and an intelligent production site („Perfect Plant“).

With the SAP MII Plant Connectivity component integrated within SAP MII, SAP extends the opportunities of connecting machines to gather automatically item quantities, current machine states and process indicators of manufacturing sites.

In order that, data is directly interchanged between the machines and the SAP system. To do so, SAP MII Plant Connectivity offers a comprehensive and standardized range of protocol modules.

Some of these modules are for example: OPC module (e.g. for Siemens SIMATIC S7 PLC), Euromap E63 module, modules for weighing systems, serial connections, etc. Additionally, SAP MII Plant Connectivity allows to connecting even specific machine controls in a simple and efficient way.

Apart from an improved data integration of the machine controlled manufacturing shop floor area and SAP ERP, SAP MII allows especially a huge functional benefit by using the highly configurable SAP MII Manufacturing Dashboards.

By user specific informational views and capture interfaces (“dashboards“), SAP MII prepares data in such a way that specific user groups (e.g. production foreman, machine operators, quality control, quality assurance) get their defined and configurable information formats and the possibility to react accordingly.

By only one single screen form (SAP MII Cockpit) every user group can react specifically to production, capacity, or quality problems.

With SAP MII, the SAP PP or SAP PP-PI generated production orders respectively process orders, work lists with prioritized and current manufacturing order processes can be set-up.

Subsequently and dependent on how defined, these work lists can be processed either directly in SAP MII (project solution), a non SAP MES system or the SAP Manufacturing Execution (SAP ME).

By decoupling the work-in process on ERP level, manufacturing orders will be completely finished in SAP MII even when the SAP ERP connection broke down. SAP MII buffers all work order steps as well as all work order acknowledgements.

Various types of production order replies and documentations (e.g. documentation of staff presence, interrupt production, alerts, secondary tasks, etc.) are handed over directly by MES or machine systems to SAP MII.For this, all common transfer standards (e.g. S95) can be used.

Subsequently, SAP MII enables to separate or consolidate material logistics reports with a time stamp respectively time registration or staff identification and to prepare data as requested for the SAP ERP system.

Additionally, consumption postings or directly item labeling can be triggered via SAP MII.

The continuous integration of SAP ERP and SAP MII enables a permanent matching and replication of all relevant and necessary production parameters.
Furthermore, SAP MII registers various manufacturing data to generate KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), production relevant reports and alerts.

SAP MII also enables to support quality securing processes (e.g. preventative quality management, measuring and controlling instruments). For example, inspection lots can be selected arbitrarily and allocated to the accordant devices and machines. Finally, SAP MII can define rules and targets, which when achieved start a pre-defined incident or an action to be carried out by SAP MII.

SAP MII is the connector between the planning level (SAP ERP or SAP APO) and the process level (MES). It communicates the planning indicators to the production process level and gets back current parameters for production control and production planning. The collection and visualisation of all necessary process data (e.g. process modes, order progress, etc.) secure a high transparency of the whole production process (monitoring).

The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) characterizes an individual indicator, which has to be defined specifically by each manufacturing enterprise, and is equivalent to the parameter, which measures the added value of a production site. The OEE parameter is composed by availability, performance and quality indicators.