SAP MII vs SAP PI

[erdem_sekeroglu]

Hello All,

One of our customer wants to use SAP MII, replacing SAP PI. They believe MII better than PI not only for manufacturing related integration but also for process integration ?

Is there a document describing main pros&cons using MII against PI ?

Regards,

Erdem Sekeroglu

Presales Manager Turkey

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Hi Erdem,

I have sent you a copy of a positioning paper for the two products. Unfortunately, I do not know if I am allowed to make it generally available through SDN and can't simply post it. If others are interested in the topic, please post and I will perform due diligence on whether it can be publicly released.

Regards,

Mike

Edited by: Michael Appleby on Apr 29, 2010 2:36 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I am interested in seeing that document.

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

While I am researching, I did find an interesting thread from long ago on the same subject.

[xMII vs XI|/thread/173946 [original link is broken];

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

As the thread asks for, where is the link to the "Positioning" paper? Any reservations in sharing it?

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

I am still looking for it on the site. Will have an answer one way or another within 24 hours, but may have to ask the author directly.

Regards,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Mike,

I am also intrested in seeing that document.

Regards

Muzammil

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

I have been unable to find the paper posted anywhere on this site or in the general internet. I have requested the author's permission to get the presentation materials posted.

I did find a good overview of the differences in a presentation on ASUG's site. Search on Platt_0602 and then go to page 31.

Thanks,

Mike

Edited by: Michael Appleby on Apr 30, 2010 12:52 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I didn't get any results for that search. Can you give me the URL to the 'Search' page?

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Here's a good conversation from a while back about the positioning of the two products.

[/thread/173946 [original link is broken]|/thread/173946 [original link is broken]]

IMHO, you should not encourage this type of cannibalism between products since each one has it's own purpose in the SAP ecosystem. The SAP PI offering is an Enterprise Message Bus and the SAP MII product is an EAI enabler, amongst other things, targeted for the manufacturing environment. SAP MII does not do documentation transformation in the same context that SAP PI allows and it does not provide detailed message tracking, delivery, and history out of the box. It does provide an extremely flexible interface for unifying plant systems and data for synchronous system communication & reporting along with the ability to pass messages to the central bus, SAP PI.

Hope this helps,

Sam

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

You do need to be a member of ASUG, but if you are not, I would contact your local User's group and see if they can cross load it.

The response from the author was that unless the document was reviewed for general consumption by our press folks, it can't be released on SDN. There is some activity on-going to see about posting something in SDN in FAQs with perhaps Sam's response being the core. The responsibility for achieving this is in the proper people's hands. I will post a message once something is available in SDN, but it will probably take a while to get approved.

Regards,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Michael - do you know if the MII vs. PI positioning paper has been released? If so, can you post a link?

I am very interested in seeing it.

Thanks.

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Sorry Brendan it was not released. I will take another look at whether there is something equivalent to it, but the core message is what Sam provided in his response.

Regards,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

Upping this topic because there seem to be no new threads since feb 2011 about it. I have a positioning paper dated from march 2008 and I guess there might be some new paper or general information about positionin SAP PI vs SAP MII.

Regards,

Petr

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Hi Petr,

As far as I have seen, there have been no new position papers regarding the two products.  I think the paper you have from 08 is still relevant as the two applications are still working each in their own space.  Not too much overlap.  Generally, I tell people that my own opinion is that if your customer or employer already has PI set up for passing data back and forth, then it is fine to use it.  If they do not and they wish to use it along with MII, I say that that just adds an additional integration layer with another application to maintain and don't recommend it.  But it is up to the customer.

Regards, Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for reply, Michael.

Actually my situation is opposite - customer wants MII to take on tasks, which are usually handled with PI: integrating ERP with MDM, transport provider solution, planning system besides integration with MES/LIMS. I understand that it is technically possible, but will require more development efforts. The dark area for me is whether MII can physically handle such workload. Some fresh information on MII technical performance would come in hand if you have any (I have the performance document from 2009 by Salvatore). Especially in compair with PI performance.

Regards,

Petr

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Hi Petr,

I would generally suggest that MII is not that well suited for all those tasks. 

Let's look at MDM.  I normally think of master data management as those items which are distributed to other systems, like APO.  So those objects are distributed via CIF rather than PI.  So I am don't think MII would be a good choice and it won't really affect whether to implement or decrement a PI installation.  If you are talking about transferring IDocs (BOM, Router, Material Master, etc.) from ERP to an MES system, then yes, this could be done by MII, but not sure I would consider that MDM.

Then there is the transport provider solution.  If you are talking about transports for changes for a system, I am not sure what the answer would be.  If you are talking about transport provider solution in terms of Transportation Management (Logisitics), moving products in trucks, ships, trains, and airplanes, I can provide some input.  SAP TM's interfaces use CIF, PI, and web services to pass information to and from other systems.  The key transactional data movements from ERP to TM are handled by PI.  Not sure how difficult it would be to replace PI with MII, but I am quite sure such an interface would not be in accordance with the configuration, master, or application guides and hence might cause a problem with warranty.  Third party logistics solutions may or may not have the same problem.

APO (planning system) is similar to SAP TM in its configuration requirements, but I am less knowledgeable in this area, so it is possible to use RFC or web services instead of PI to integrate to ERP. 

I think it would have to be a case by case evaluation.  If the customer is trying to reduce the overall PI transaction count to reduce the sum of the per transaction fees, then this might be a good approach, but there may be better approaches to investigate, perhaps even renegotiating a fee structure with SAP. 

Hope this helps,

Mike

Message was edited by: Michael Appleby

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Michael,

There is no PI or MII currently in use by customer, because project is at conceptual phase.

Customer do not want to buy and support both products because he thinks that one of them can handle all the integration tasks. My task is to find out whether it is true. I understand that it is not the best way to manage integration tasks, but that is not my decision.

Anyway, thanks for your detailed answer, I think I'd better start few more specific topics. Still if you have any fresh performance document on MII or PI, then I would be very greatful if you provide me with it.

Regards, Petr

[agentry_src · Accepted solution]

Hi Petr,

As far as MII integrating to ERP, you can almost certainly not install PI.  But for integrating to other systems, you may not have a choice.  I would contact Sam Castro for any new performance documents since he did the original testing a few years ago.

Regards, Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I'm interested, too.

[salvatore_castro]

Hello everyone,

I have written the following BLOG and hope that this helps you to better understand the products and the integration strategy pros and cons of each and both:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-52940

Sam

[Former Member]

Thanks a lot.

[Former Member]

I would be very interested in your document if it is available.  James Webster - New to SAP at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. [Email removed by Moderator]

[Former Member]

We use both MII 12.2 and PI 7.1 here. PI is used for A2A and B2B integration, while MII is used for visualisation and business intelligence. They are 2 very different products. We've never had a single issue with PI, it just works, while we've had a plethora of issues with MII (e.g., upgrades not backward compatible, performance problems, poor data transformation capabilities). To be honest if you don't need visualisation or connection to OPC servers, then stay away from MII.

[salvatore_castro]

Alain,

I looked at your profile to try and track you down a bit to see what exactly the issues are that you are referring to as it is a bit vague in nature.  I have been working very closely with both MII and PI product teams to come to a common positioning between the products and a joint value add statement as to when and why for both.  I would recommend against stating to the manufacturing user community against leveraging MII for Mfg systems integration in favor of using PI or PI-sheets.  Aside from this not being the strategic direction for SAP Mfg as a whole, there are typical problems that arise when trying to do near real-time vizalization of shop-floor data for local users from local systems using a single central system. 

• 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 to multiple distributed MII instances
• 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
• Supports limited survivability scenarios where local data collection is required
• SAP MII enables limited survivability when plants are disconnected from the enterprise
• SAP MII provides enterprise context to the multitude of disparate manufacturing systems so that the enterprise systems involved can understand what is happening at the Mfg level and vice-versa.

If you wuold like to discuss any of these points further please feel free to reply, but if you would like to discuss your experiences/issues with MII in general please start a new thread, one that isn't marked as answered, and I will address them best that I can.

Sam

PS: MII also provides connectivity to more systems than just OPC servers, native historian integration is also possible, and is a proven solution across multiple industries.

[Former Member]

Thanks
Shashank

[Former Member]

Hi all,

This image is shown in the course of SAP MII.

MII is used vertically with plant systems and enterprise.

PI is used horizontally with enterprise systems.

Hope this help.

Danilo Santos