Formerly from Magnitude Software and now from Insightsoftware, Angles is a solution to accelerate the distribution of actionable, operational reports and analytics.
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SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence is a manufacturing operations analytics application.
If you desire to 'empower' employees to create or edit their own reports, Noetix is a great tool, though I am not particularly an 'empowerment' person. In my experience most people have enough work of their own, so to tell them they now have to create their own reports can cause problems. If someone is available, like I am, to create the reports based on user requirements, then the report can be shared with the user and they can make changes as needed. I have several users who use the same report over and over for slightly different applications, and they are happy to make the small alterations, but creating whole new reports can seem like a daunting task. I tell my users I don't want them to become frustrated. If they want to try on their own, fine, but don't waste more than half an hour, and if you start to get frustrated, stop and IM me. Ninety-nine times out of 100 I already have a report that will give them exactly what they need. I've done extensive training, and find it's quite easy for users to pick up
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.
Noetix makes reporting easy. Users can combine vtables (the Noetix term for its views), add or delete columns, add filters or parameters, sort, add totals to columns, all from an easy to use interface. It comes with a very large number of already written reports for all areas of Oracle reporting, but it also allows for custom vtables to be written, for Oracle or any database, to expand the number of available reports.
Noetix has an Excel add-in that is marvelous. It eliminates the need to run a report in the web application and export to Excel. The add-in can run very large reports, up to a million lines. Once a report is run in Excel, it can be saved, and then refreshed whenever needed. It's a really good tool.
Noetix is flexible. Joins can be added to existing Noetix vtables and also to custom vtables, to give users a large amount of data configurations to choose from. It also allows users to create calculated fields to any report.
Noetix is easy to administer. Users can be added or removed and grouped by the level of permission. Although, in our case, it validates against Oracle, the level of security is dictated by Noetix.
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.
I like the fact that the output is standard, but I would like to be able to move columns around on the output screen, rather than having to go back to the editing screen, move the columns, then rerun the report.
Drag and drop of columns would be nice on the edit screen. Currently if you add a column to a report, it automatically goes to the bottom. Relocation of the column has to be done a line at a time. I would prefer to be able to grab the field I want from those available, and drop it into the report where I want it.
When adding a filter (or parameter), the available fields automatically come up in alphabetical order, but on the columns screen, they don't. They come up in the order they actually are in the query. That means, when creating custom vtables, to have the fields in alphabetical order, one must put them that way. It would be nice if Noetix put the fields in alphabetical order for the user.
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.
I believe Noetix is much easier to use than either Crystal Reports or InfoMaker. When I worked with InfoMaker I used to say it took 5 minutes to get the data and 5 hours (and sometimes days) to make it look good. The same can be true for Crystal Reports. Noetix has a standard format, and most people export to Excel anyway. Who prints reports? So formatting is not all that important.
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.
