This system disparity creates the fundamental problem facing manufacturers today — lack of visibility to information and synchronization across their manufacturing operations. Very few manufacturers automatically integrate their plant data into their ERP system. The disconnect between the shop floor and the ERP system costs millions of dollars through waste, rejects, and re-orders. SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII) enables production personnel to detect and resolve schedule, material, machine, labor, and quality issues proactively. I’ll explain how xMII fits into the adaptive manufacturing concept to connect the various layers in a manufacturing systems landscape and provide some real-world examples. To read about the manufacturing layers that xMII brings together, see the sidebar, “The Manufacturing Information Systems Landscape.” Refer to the sidebar, “xMII Installation Prerequisites,” for what you should have in place before you install xMII. In my next article, I’ll detail how to implement xMII.

How xMII Works

The highly fragmented Shop Floor Automation and Control (SFAC) environment makes it hard to have the same set of data accessible to planners and quality and production personnel. For example, it is not unusual for a quality manager to learn about a quality problem from a furious customer rather than from the factory floor system. Production managers find it difficult to set production targets because they lack an integrated overview of orders, materials, machine, labor, quality, or maintenance exceptions. This limits their ability to respond to factory issues and leads to missed orders or shipments. Also, a production manager must log in to three to six different systems to find the cause for a delayed shipment or to analyze a customer complaint. To become adaptive, manufacturers need horizontal integration across their shop floor systems within the plant. The vertical synchronization between the business processes in the ERP system and plant processes on the shop floor is even more important. To achieve this, manufacturers need a flexible operation platform to handle the complex information landscape. SAP adaptive manufacturing with xMII connects mySAP ERP Central Component (ECC) or R/3 to SFAC systems and manufacturing operations to enable business processes to reach the shop floor. It also allows manufacturing operations data and exceptions to reach ECC or R/3.

Business Scenario Examples

Although the xMII flexible framework can benefit any business process, you can see the benefits in three major areas:

• Operational monitoring and control: xMII enables real-time performance management in scenarios in which the typical applications are dashboards or scorecards. xMII also enables metrics such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), downtime analysis, production cost, and yield.
• Quality management and continuous improvement: xMII supports initiatives such as Six Sigma, Lean, and Total Quality Management (TQM).
• Manufacturing synchronization: xMII integrates the plant execution data and results to enterprise processes. It also facilitates implementation of standards-based plant-to-enterprise integration. xMII service- enables existing plant applications so that they can be part of an overall enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).

Here’s how each of these areas enables typical manufacturing business scenarios.

Operational Monitoring and Control

xMII ad-hoc reporting allows you to compare assets to assets and plants to plants. It also allows you to view operation metrics. Reports can combine data from multiple systems on the shop floor, ECC or R/3, and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI). Users can drill down from ECC or R/3 to the warehouse, and then to the shop floor — even down to line or machine views of current or historical data. The xMII analytics engine provides real- time data to optimize production and increase quality. xMII monitors real-time manufacturing performance, measures targets, detects events, and alerts users of exceptions as they unfold. It also checks overall equipment availability and damaged product ratio by manufacturing line. For example, you could compare two manufacturing lines for a selected shift to see which is performing better to determine the best-in-class matrix. The production overview dashboard allows you to compare real-time performance data (Figure 1). In this example, you can see that while the performance appears to be better for the line represented on the left side of the charts, the Plant Damage Ratio is higher for that line. The Operator Cycle Time, reset to zero, shows a down line or end of shift. You could view more information by clicking on the Details button, which provides drill-down capabilities for the particular line or machine. The Operations Overview example in Figure 2 shows a unified view of shop floor connectivity to three systems and ERP integration into Plant Maintenance (PM). For instance, a juice manufacturer could view real-time data about a manufacturing run of strawberry-kiwi juice. By looking at the Operations Overview, you immediately could see that the L1 Filler machine needs attention because it’s out of bottles. You also could see that in the past day OEE has slipped below both the average and target rates. You can build this screen using xMII visualization services to provide historical and current data in the form of metrics for decision support. The Operations Overview also combines equipment status views from SCADA, production schedules from ECC or R/3, and production totals by shift from MES. In addition, this screen provides an analytics view of OEE for the last 10 days. In case of a breakdown, the operator can initiate maintenance processes by creating a maintenance notification directly in PM.

Quality Management and Continuous Improvement

Through quality metrics and statistical process control (SPC) analysis xMII addresses quality problems as they happen. xMII provides real-time, actionable data to react to unforeseen events. Say a company receives a customer complaint about the quality of items in an order. Figure 3 shows the drill-down capability to the production batches created for the customer’s order. xMII also can identify up to 19 other batches created from the same material and by the same equipment. The plant’s batch management system queries the quality data from these batches using xMII data connectors. These data connectors conduct SPC and quality calculations by using Business Logic Services (BLS) analytics and the SPC engine. The results in the SPC chart in Figure 3 show that the problem appears in two batches. Using xMII BLS, the system creates a quality notification in SAP Quality Management (QM), and sends an alert email and report to the product manager. In a few minutes, the affected production manager, customers, and their representatives are notified to avoid problems. This process reduces the discovery-to-containment time from one week to four hours or less.

Manufacturing Synchronization

xMII integration provides a single platform to connect ECC or R/3 and plant systems in real time (Figure 4). Through its library of pre-built connectors and bidirectional (read/write) capabilities, xMII can connect with hundreds of shop-floor systems in real time to extract relevant data. It also can update processes and operational variables without the need to move or replicate data. xMII uses Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs), Remote Function Calls (RFCs), IDocs, and remote-enabled function modules in ECC or R/3 to execute transactions and download orders, inventories, assets schedules, and quality information to the shop floor. xMII can access SAP NetWeaver BI InfoCubes and provide analytics iViews to SAP NetWeaver Portal. The result is full synchronization between ECC or R/3 and the shop floor. xMII links the plant execution systems and the enterprise Business Processes Management (BPM) systems. The Shop Floor Job Management dashboard in Figure 5 gives a unified view of scheduled orders, components by order, inventory levels, and past material confirmations. For example, the Shop Floor Job Management dashboard allows an operator to work in multiple systems without logging in and out of them. The operator sees the production schedule for his work center, the current running production order, and a drilldown from the production order on each of the components. An inventory view shows the inventories for each material in real time. In a single action, the operator can view all confirmations posted to the order. The operator also can post to SAP Materials Management (MM) and confirm the actual quantities consumed in the production order. Supervisors can compare shift results, monitor asset utilization, and receive alerts when production delays and quality problems materialize. Plant managers can monitor the roll-up of KPIs or measure performance against targets. Division managers can set up metrics and best-of-class scorecards to improve and standardize business processes across plants or divisions. xMII mobile capabilities can send maintenance notifications in real time to avoid downtime or quality issues. SAP xMII automates data entry and creates production confirmations, process messages, and material receipts. xMII BLS transfers real-time actual material consumption, quality inspection results, and movement information from shop floor equipment to ECC or R/3 through transaction and RFC calls. xMII also works with mySAP Business Suite to create quality notification data, batch characteristic recording, work orders and results recording, and maintenance notifications in real time to enable TQM and production control processes.

The Technology and Tools Behind xMII

The integration between xMII and ECC or R/3, and end-to-end custody of data by one system, allows you to execute and monitor business processes with one platform (Figure 6). In addition, through xMII visualization and role-based dashboards, you can provide a single view into the operational data without logging in and out of multiple systems. xMII uses standards, such as single sign-on (SSO) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), to enable users to access multiple systems through a single access point (portal). Within the portal, users can control operations using Web pages, iViews, and Portal technologies. xMII enables adaptive manufacturing with data services, analytics and BLS, and visualization services. Data services. These allow you to extract and aggregate data from hundreds of shop floor applications and make it appear as if it comes from a single source. The write-back capability allows for bidirectional integration, which updates and provides feedback to the target system. This enables real-time correction or process variables adjustments. By using just one data layer, you can provide BLS with aggregated data for further processing and inject intelligence through the manufacturing process. SAP xMII data services use standards such as Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), and online analytical processing (OLAP) to build xMII connectors. These connectors provide a plug-and-play means to interface process, production, or business systems into SAP xMII. Once these systems are connected (a process that takes only minutes), SAP xMII extracts, aggregates, and analyzes the information, presenting it in personalized views. xMII Universal Data Server (UDS) enables SAP xMII to query common manufacturing systems, such as tag- based human machine interface (HMI), SCADA, automation, and historian systems. Table 1 shows a list of some of the systems and connectors available to xMII.

xMII can connect to any system using standards such as JDBC and OPC
Plant automation	Historians	LIMS	MES systems
Wonderware Intellution Siemens Rockwell Ci Technologies USDATA ...more	AspenTech Intellution Honeywell AutomSoft Canary Labs OSI Rockwell Wonderware ...more	Beckman PE Nelson Lab Systems Sample Manager ...more	Wonderware Honeywell Camstar CIMNET GE Rockwell ...more

Table 1

A sample list of systems and connectors. A more detailed list is available on the SCM Expert Web site. (Source: SAP Labs)

Analytics and BLS. Using the BLS graphical interface (Figure 7), available through the xMII development bench on the Web, you can enforce business processes and module workflows, schedule tasks, and conduct SPC. The business logic engine accepts many types of data inputs (e.g., queries, IDocs, BAPIs, flat files, Web scrapings, XML, HTML, text) and aggregate data from multiple systems. It then analyzes the data and converts it to correlate with operational data. BLS results also can take many forms, such as XML queries, IDocs, BAPI calls, flat files, Web services, graphics, charts, and PDFs. BLS supports a variety of interfaces, including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)/Web Services, HTTP/ HTTPS, FTP, direct file input/output (I/O), email, and message client capability. For integration with ECC or R/3, BLS supports Web services, SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI), direct RFC/BAPI calls, and SAP Business Connector. xMII visualization services. These provide objects such as charts, grids, tickers, and controls to build operational dashboards quickly (Figure 8) that provide a portal to the manufacturing platform. Visualization services also can feed visualization objects directly to plant or enterprise portals (such as SAP NetWeaver Portal through XML, HTML, and iViews). In addition, xMII can render the same objects to mobile applications providing mobile users access to the same data and operation parameters accessible to shop floor personnel.

xMII Deployment and Architecture

With a small footprint and out-of-the-box connection capability, you can implement xMII in a few weeks to collect and aggregate data from distributed systems. xMII makes use of your current system, so you don’t need to replace or rebuild it. The xMII connector library extracts information from and interfaces to existing systems. Users can access the xMII services using SAP NetWeaver Portal in a standard Web browser. The Web service interface provides wider application-to-application integration for internal and external integration with other plants, vendors, partners, and even customer applications. To optimize connectivity and reduce network traffic, place the xMII server close to the shop floor data sources. xMII connectors optimize the communication between the target system and the xMII server, as well as among different xMII servers. You can implement SAP xMII in a single plant or across multiple plants. In the single plant environment, one xMII server provides operational integration and visibility for production personnel. In the multi-plant environment, each plant has an xMII server. An optional, additional xMII corporate server aggregates and compares multi-site data to provide plant-to-plant or divisional views and analytics for a complete Balanced Scorecard or best-of-class comparison. One of the reasons to have an xMII server at each plant is that most of the applications xMII interacts with and connects to, such as control systems and process historians, are operational and required at each plant. Also, the data volume generated from some of these targets is very high and transferring it across the network may impact performance. Additionally, having an xMII server at each plant allows you the option of running in a disconnected mode in case of wide area network (WAN) outage or ERP maintenance. xMII supports ISA-95 enterprise-to-plant integrations with message composition, aggregation, and decomposition (even with legacy systems). This allows users to deploy an ISA-95-based interoperability strategy throughout the company — even if some plant systems do not follow ISA-95 standards. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Instrumentation Systems and Automation Society (ISA) developed the ANSI/ISA-95 standard to provide standard models and terminology interfaces between enterprise business systems and a shop floor control systems. In my next article, I will go over the xMII implementation strategy.

The Manufacturing Information System Landscape A typical manufacturing information system landscape has three layers: SFAC systems, manufacturing operations, and ERP (Figure 1).