Connecting shop floor to SAP ERP via SAP MII: A demo at the Instrument Symposium

Just returned from attending the Instrumentation Symposium at Texas A&M.  For third year in a row I have attended this conference that focuses on process safety put on by the Mary Kay O’Conner Center for Process Safety.

Each prior year I have presented on the topic of recording failures within the SAP ERP solution, covering how to set up the solution, how to record failures (manually). Our aim was to show how using the SAP products we could monitor sis / sif processes, record the data, and trigger the maintenance / inspection processes.

This year we brought the topics together and demonstrated how with SAP MII and SAP Pco (plant connectivity) for connectivity and monitoring, we could take and monitor signals from a pressure sensor. And when the signal value being monitored passed a limit, change the monitoring display to highlight the value change, and eventually when the signal value exceeds the High-High Limit, pass this information into SAP ERP EAM in the form of a Plan Maintenance Notification. And at the same time issue an SMS Message with this information to selected phones.

 
Pic 1 SAP MII Display before limit violation

Pic 2 SAP MII  display after limit violation

Developing this demo was very interesting. I spent significantly more time building out the plant structure that we used in SAP ERP than my colleague did in building the SAP MII portion. Using the delivered integration he was able to pull down into the SAP MI Plant Information Catalog all the functional location and equipment information that I had built in SAP EAM.  From that point it was a matter of minutes to build the linkage between the business objects (SAP ERP) and the shop floor identifies (Tags associated with the equipment).

Pic 3: Structure as defied in SAP ERP

Pic 4: Structure as defined in SAP MII Plant Information Catalog

Thus we were able to gather information from the sensors and build up the event log in SAP ERP using the transaction IW30.

Pic 5: Event Log

As always when we build out a demo we learn something. In this case was to make sure that your SMS provider coves the countries that you are dealing with. We had set up myself and my U.S. based colleagues to receive the SMS notifications, but when we were testing, I did not get the Message. A problem with the system? Of course not. Being Canadian with a Canadian phone number, I was not included in the SMS plan we had selected.

It is always the little things that get you.

All told it was a good conference, learnt a lot, and have some very interesting discussions on how to support the requirements of the group. Hope to see you there next year.