For downtime tracking, the process is well suited to tracking the operation of an entire process or plant; it is not suited to tracking individual equipment reliability. For inventory management, it is suited to tracking either bulk or discrete production, as its concepts are quite general. The Metrics engine is suited to smaller deployments; larger deployments would do better to extract and warehouse the raw data for external analysis and reporting.
SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence as a stand-alone platform seems to be quite powerful with a wide range of capabilities and integration options. The integration itself proved to be challenging which was mentioned before. We also had some issues with delays in data queries which resulted in delays of the visual representation on the SSCE dashboards.
MII is particularly good at providing and customizing dashboards for quick analysis of industrial IoT data.
MII also has built-in analysis functionality to make more sense of all the IoT data being streamed.
MII (and ME) are particularly effective at identifying outliers and problems with equipment/processes before they cause delays or other cascading issues. This allows for effective preventative maintenance.
If a proper UI5-based implementation is done, the system works at best if a proper application server and database exist. However, from a customization perspective and an easy-to-implement application-from-scratch perspective, MII is top-notch compared to the other mentioned systems. SAP ME sits on top of SAP MII as a foundation.
Documentation on some of our implementations was lacking. As an example, creating the query that reads the tag is explained through the documentation but this only explains very specific data models. Other models are not explained and take time to debug. Customer support was willing to help and an official note was created after we found some issues with the integration tools.
We evaluate a number of inventory management products; however, none provided the full pit-to-port coverage. There were only AVEVA Manufacturing Execution, powered by Ampla, and ION Qmastor. AVEVA Manufacturing Execution, powered by Ampla, provided a simpler interface, while the QMastor product seemed to be a collection of applications. There were other products evaluated, but they were not yet mature and proven.
SAP MII is a robust platform for data visualization and data integration. It isn't very intuitive and has the shortcomings explained throughout the review. It still uses old Java versions which is incompatible with updated versions. The SAP ME and SAP CP provide cloud-based solutions that seem to provide a more innovative approach.
Downtime classification has made sense of plant reliability data; whereas, before it was unstructured and could not be used for analysis
Production tracking and reporting. This solution is providing a unified, common source of production tracking for all departments, stored in a database rather than spreadsheets. A single source of truth ensures all data aligns and matches.
KPIs are providing a measurable indicator of performance against company-defined targets.
