SAP MII and SAP PI in the Industrial Space
I am very often asked by our customers how best to align and leverage the use of SAP PI and MII in a landscape to deliver the best possible solution to the business. From here the response is typically, what are you trying to achieve but in the below I am going to attempt to outline the two products in terms that will hopefully apply to you (Critical feedback is appreciated as this will only make this post better for everyone). While from a very high-level the two products appear to support the same or similar integration scenarios they in fact are designed with specific use-cases in mind.
SAP PI and MII
Simple Statements on position and product focus
SAP PI is…
- an A2A and B2B connector framework to integrate various kinds of enterprise systems and applications
- a Business process engine to support state-full, long running business processes (Process Orchestration)
- an integration tool that does not support a manufacturing end-user focused UI engine to integrate manufacturing people with processes
- the SAP solution for enterprise application integration
- capable of working with SAP MII in a decentralized and asynchronous/synchronous Manufacturing environment for QoS Messaging (EO & EOIO)
- from an architectural point of view, a separate system, whose functionality are deployed in a complementary way, meaning:
- SAP PI as central instance in data processing service center
- SAP MII as separate deployment instance, often at the manufacturing site, with PI client capabilities, including local queues to withstand network and system outages and bandwidth constraints
Positioning of the two products in your landscape
When positioning MII & PI in your integration landscape there are a couple of points to take into consideration:
- SAP MII focuses on the integration of disparate manufacturing systems to provide a common interface for both users and technical systems, agnostic of the underlying systems and their technical nuances
- SAP Process Integrator focuses on the integration of enterprise level business systems and provides robust business to business interfaces
- SAP ERP can pass messages to PI which can providing routing and QoS messaging capabilities to multiple remote MII instances simultaneously
- This is done asynchronously using an HTTP Endpoint in PI and the MII Messaging Services
- SAP MII can generically handle XML messages from PI and process them upon arrival or queue them for batch processing
- SAP PI supports global data needs and MII supports local data needs. “Let the enterprise worry about enterprise issues and plants worry about plant issues”
- SAP MII has special functionality for communicating with PI to leverage its Message QoS and Routing capabilities for the delivery of messages to Enterprise systems
- Supports limited survivability scenarios where local data collection is required
- SAP MII enables limited survivability when plants are disconnected from the enterprise
Top Technical Features of PI & MII
What do you get from SAP PI?
- EAI Platform
- Enterprise Messaging
- Centralized configuration, tracing, monitoring, and maintenance of messages across sites and between systems
- Guaranteed Delivery and Store Forward
- Enterprise Service Repository
- State-full Workflow for Process Orchestration
- BPM Tools
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) functionality
- Asynchronous Communication
What do you get from SAP MII?
- Composition Environment, including GUI tools specifically designed for plant use cases, to develop applications for manufacturing
- Store Forward when connection down
- Manufacturing Systems Connectivity
- EAI/EOM enabler for the plant
- Enterprise message client for PI
- Supports using PI queues for Quality of Service (QoS supports both EO & EOIO)
- Easy to use tools to take data from plant systems and populate message templates for message consumption by enterprise applications
- Largely synchronous communication
- Rich analytic capabilities
- Lean and graphical service-enabled composition environment (Codeless)
- Service enablement of the shop floor
- Simple data aggregation and transformation tools
When should you use SAP PI?
- You wish to use Process Integration as the SOA backbone in your Enterprise
- To Establish ES Repository as the central SOA repository in customer landscapes
- To Leverage support of additional WS standards such as UDDI, WS-BPEL and tasks, WS-RM across the enterprise landscape
- Enable high-volume and mission-critical integration scenarios between business applications
- Benefit from new functionality, such as principal propagation, XML validation, and BAM capabilities
When should you use SAP MII?
- You have a heterogeneous set of plant data stores that you want to organize and analyze
- You want to get consistent manufacturing operations reporting across sites
- You need to drill down into plant data stores and across different data stores for manufacturing intelligence applications
- You wish to connect proprietary plant applications to ERP data and work processes – through standard and native out of the box connectors and tools
- You need to enable plant personnel to be able to perform reporting (Standard, Mobile, and Ad-Hoc) along with basic execution
PROs and CONs of ERP Integration with and without PI and MII
This section will outline the various scenarios of including and excluding PI and MII from various scenarios in the manufacturing/industrial space.
Messages flow between ERP, PI, and then to multiple Plant systems (Without MII)
- Message routing and transformation is defined per site in PI (Plants are similar but each has nuance differences that need to be accounted for)
- Very often this can limit plant autonomy in what they can change
- Message processing can vary from each of the 3rd Party Solutions, no consistency
- Customized integration to 3rd Party Solutions are not supported by SAP
- 3rd Party Solution probably requires customization to handle messages, even ISA standard messages are customized to fit actual business requirements
- 3rd Party Solutions probably vary from site to site and requires customization support either in PI or in the 3rd Party Solution
- 3rd Party Solution probably does not support central governance and management of content
Messages flow between ERP, PI, and then to multiple Plant systems (With MII)
Asynchronous Messaging with SAP PI & MII (MII screens can still perform synchronous BAPI/RFC calls directly to SAP ERP when required)
- Messages flow between SAP ERP, SAP PI, and then to multiple SAP MII instances
- Message routing is defined in SAP PI and message processing rules are defined in SAP MII
- Some sites require different rules than others, conglomeration of plant systems
- SAP MII absolves the central systems from having to know about site variances with applications and technical systems
- Everything “appears” the same to the enterprise so communication is consistent and easy to maintain
- Disconnected plant operation for support of local data collection and central business rules
- Central governance and management of software and content
Messages flow between ERP, and then to multiple MII instances (without SAP PI)
Messages flow between ERP and directly to multiple MII instances
- Message routing is custom defined in ERP via destinations and partner profiles
- Without custom ERP routing definitions all messages are sent to every MII server
- Does not provide the same level of Monitoring and routing capabilities as PI; uses direct JRA communication between ERP and MII
- QoS of EO standard in 14.0 and EOIO built in Composite Applications (ie: ME-INT, CAMS-INT)
- Details are here: Message Services – SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence – SAP Library
- MII absolves the ERP system from having to know about site variances or delivery to multiple site systems simultaneously
- Everything “appears” the same to the enterprise so communication is consistent
- Disconnected plant operation for support of local data collection and central business rules
Conclusion
Based on the above I hope that it is now clear how both PI and MII play together in a manufacturing/industrial landscape for supporting operations visibility and reporting at the local, regional, and central levels. This document (although a bit older now) may also help to shed some light on typical implementation architectures and additional points to consider:
SAP Manufacturing Implementation Architecture: The purpose of this document is to explain the standard implementation practices for Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence, Manufacturing Execution, and Plant Connectivity. The specific focus is around why and how to use the various products provided by SAP and the technical & business features of how they co-exist with each other in your landscape for maximum ROI.
Once again your candid feedback is appreciated.
Sam
Great. Thank you!
useful info thanks
Sam
as usual, great article, helps to clarify the positioning of MII and PI, Whilst MII is positioned as an 'integration' platform for lot of companies, its worth noting that MII provides an awful lot more that PI cannot provide
some examples
1 – dash board cockpit based on process areas or roles
2 – role based UX, highly tailored and simplified
3 – front ‘skin’ for simplifying complex ERP screens and process in MFG
4 – deep and rich extension to the core ERP components
5 – platform for LEAN projects
6 – MII is ‘easy’ to mobilise, and expose to ODATA, does not need SUP
7 – runs in NW to access NW Gateway
8 – is HTML5 compliant, therefore device agnostic,
9 – provide data to HANA for real time MFG analytics
10 – Provide data sources to Lumira for extended visualisation
11 – based on 10 will feed data to Lumira Cloud…making data accessible anywhere (but Lumira is not mobile/UI5..yet)
12 – core component for energy management and SAP Green / sustainability solution's
13 - provides OEE solution 'out of the box', providing asset utilisation solutions
14 - foundation to Asset Health and condition based maintenance
I could add some more, however the above provides further items for thought
best regards
Adrian
Hello,
We are looking at MII but already have an enterprise integration engine like SAP PI. It handles SAP integration to/from SAP to the rest of our enterprise. I would like to leverage our current integration layer with MII. First, is that possible and Second, what would be the disadvantages. Also, what would be the best mechanism to integrate with Mii.
Do you mean to use MII at the enterprise layer for integration or as outlined above to have MII as the Manufacturing/Operations integration layer to automate the process of loading your operations data with the enterprise?
We have a lot of content out of the box with MII for integration and we have technical features as well which enable you to build out additional scenarios. In MII there is a messaging services layer which will accept message asynchronously from an SAP PI HTTP Endpoint and yes MII supports SSO with PI. As for sending messages back to PI there are action blocks in the MII Transaction engine for this and they are outlined here and they can be configured to leverage the PI Queuing as well for EO & EOIO support:
XI - Content Development - SAP Library
One is an HTTP Post and the other is a SOAP call depending on your preference (Yes ESR services are also supported).
Please also refer the section above titled "Messages flow between ERP, PI, and then to multiple Plant systems (With MII)" for pros and cons.
Does this answer your question?
Thanks,
Sam
Sam,
Thanks for the note. One of my questions is does MII come bundled with PI? From what I see in the above article is that MII is more for integration to MES, DCS etc., and is there a list of the vs., standards, devices, MES's etc., MII can integrate with OTB.
For, enterprise wide integration, SAP PI or other Vendor ESB is required and then there are standard ways to integrate between either PI, another Vendor ESB with MII. The reason I ask is we have a Enterprise ESB in place that integrates with SAP and many other apps and now looking for MII to handle the mfg integration requirements and working in conjunction with our ESB for EnterpriseWide considerations. thx, John
John
PI is typically positioned as Enterprise Level integration platform (or ESB) as you rightly deducted already, however when you want to bridge the executive board room floor with the shop floor, then for OTB capability, its MII all the way. It offers many of the integration capabilities of PI, but comes with 150+ pre-built connectors, is S95/OPC/S88 compliant, links to pretty much all the major MES / SCADA/Historian when coupled with PCO..but as I point out above already, it will also give you far more than PI...for me, MII wins hands down here
good luck
Adrian
Third option is more feasible for a typical manufacturing company which doesn't have PI system in their landscape. ECC handles routing pretty fine by destinations and partner profiles.
Thanks
Hari
useful information for me. Thank you so much
Is there an official Roadmap for SAP MII?
We need to understand if SAP MII is positioned long term and strategically, and we need to ensure we do not commit to a technology that might be replaced/not-supported in the next couple of years.
Hello Jaco,
I am the Global Solution Owner for the SAP MII product and Yes there is! I suggest that you please reach out to me via email so that I can share our product development strategy with you. There is already approved development resources for additional content to be delivered with MII late this year or early next year and this is in addition to core feature/function improvements to the MII product.
Sam
Hello Sam, I want to learn about SAP MII product in detail (Technically), I am having 10 plus years experience into SAP PI and ABAP . Could you please advise the way forward at [removed by Moderator] . Regards
Rajesh
Excellent explanation.
Regards,
Mukesh Pandey
Our MES uses a lot of synchronous SOAP Webservices to connect to ERP, APO and third party warehouse systems.
The used services are provided by ERP, APO and third party warehouse system. Some services are provided out of the box (i.e. SAP Enterpises Services), some services are custom extensions for our needs.
We are using PI:
There was a SAP customer success story for the usage of Enterprise services and PI, about our system.
I think, it is necessary to define, what is a MES.
Is it a system in the meaning of ANSI/ISA95 and one system controls the whole plant (or even more than one plant)?
Or is it a landscape of grown SCADA, PLC, HMI systems per plant?
In the first case the ERP integration probably is more a task of enterprise integration.
At the moment we are demanded to check if PI can be replaced by the MII system, used for other plants, to save license costs.
I have no knowledge of MII.
There seem’s to be no service repository at MII.
The MII-Team never heard of SAP enterprise services. After two weeks of testing they weren’t able to provide an ERP default service by MII. Consumption of service by MII worked, but providing without changes didn’t work.
I’m not sure, if importing of interface definitions of sender and receiver and doing integration configuration is in the focus of MII-Team at all.
There is typically no message logging activated at our MII systems.
There is a MII-failover/loadbalance cluster in central data center for all plants connected to MII.
In our MII default procedure for connecting plants almost every errorhandling of ERP transactions is done by email.
The 2 plants using our MES, connected by PI, are doing forty times more ERP transactions per time than the average plant connected by MII. Most of the transactions are done automatically. Every error Handling is done by response message.
From my point of view MII seem’s to be more an Application System with manufacturing equipment integration capabilities.
Whereas PI is a SOA communication middleware.
To say it in ANSI/ISA levels: PI is between ERP and MES level. MII is at MES level and is someway in competition with ISA95 compliant MES systems.