It's been a long time in the works and finally during the week of September 28th the newly anticipated SCM380 training was in full swing! Diana Hoppe has worked vigorously over the past year fine tuning the prior training material. I am pleased to say the new training manual offers a comprehensive overview of SAP MII and is written as a reference document so that students can easily reference the manual as needed.
The first teach took place at the Newtown Square campus of SAP and was taught by the author Diana Hoppe, and Yana Davydova who is an SAP education instructor. There was a lot of information to cover in five days, but everyone focused on their goals and got it done! Roughly 30 participants attended the first teach and the participants included a good mixture of both partners and customers looking to upgrade, potential customers looking to learn more about the product, as well as employees looking to gain some MII knowledge so they are capable of supporting the existing team.
The course covered an array of topics including an introduction to MII, data and visualization services, navigation and personalization, web scripting in MII and business logic services. The MII product links the manufacturing of a company to the rest of the business. It solves the disconnect between the shop floor and ERP and it provides manufacturing data in two ways:
Manufacturing Integration: integrated real-time plant processes with business operations
Manufacturing Intelligence: real time analytics engine that collects and delivers information including KPIs, alerts, relevant events and decision support
In the data services section, we were introduced to the SAP MII workbench, which is the environment that allows users to simplify the development of transactions, query and display templates, animated objects, reference documents and user content by combining numerous user interfaces into one. We also covered an introduction into each of the aforementioned topics. From there we moved onto the navigation and personalization section where we learned how to customize the navigation tree and our home style page. I personally enjoyed this section because I like having the option to customize things to my own liking.
We then learned about web scripting in MII. Web scripting provides the user with the ability to use JavaScript to make their applets interactive. We were shown how to add an event to the applet definition, and we were shown that once the event is triggered it calls a JavaScript function, which makes the interaction between applets possible. The training manual spelled out common and specific applet events which I found to be helpful and will probably reference again in the future. Within this section we also learned how to customize and add dynamically-generated HTML content to our web pages. The last part of this lesson focused on localization, specifically adapting the product to a specific user language.
The final section of this training was focused on Business Logic Servcies (BLS). This was the longest section of the training, but undoubtably the one that garnered the most attention from the class. The customers especially seemed thrilled with the idea of business logic services and couldn't wait to dive in more! In the first section we completed an overview of terms and the BLS environment; we learned how to build a transaction, and about actions and sequences. I thoroughly enjoyed this section because I liked building the transactions and having the actions/sequences executed in the order that I set forth. Cool stuff! Furthermore, we learned about the link editor which allows a user to map a value into the input. The concept of linking is to dynamically assign input values to the action at runtime. This section of the training was a little difficult for me to understand. I understood the main concept, but think that I'm going to need some more time and practice to really get down all the functions of the link editor.
A year ago when Diana started working on the training material I was tasked with editing and testing the exercises she wrote to ensure everything worked the way it was supposed to. While I was editing I was trying to absorb as much information as possible and I was basically teaching myself, which proved to be difficult. After a lot of work and time I was excited to be given the opportunity to take the class in a student/teacher environment and WOW what a difference it made! Trying to teach yourself something versus having an expert teach you, is like night and day. The instructors were very hands on and not only were they there to do their job of teaching the information, but you could tell that they cared whether or not you truly understood the material. Diana Hoppe even went as far as to offer up her own contact information for future questions or problems!
Overall, I would say the SCM380 training was a true success. The instructors knew their information and were nothing short of fantastic in answering any and all questions and assisting students through the exercises all while ensuring they understood the material. I would recommend this class for anyone who works with SAP MII, has any interest in working with SAP MII, or just wants to gain more knowledge of SAP products. This product is extremely diverse in its capabilities and if you are interested in learning more than this course is for you! Diana Hoppe did an excellent job of authoring the material and making sure students are able to reference the manaul again and again.
To register for an upcoming SCM380 course please follow the link below:
https://training.sap.com/course/scm380-mii-manuf-integ-and-intelligence-fundamentals-classroom-073-u...
