MII Vs BI/BW

[Former Member]

Hi,

I am BI/ABAP consultant and new to MII.

My client is looking for use of MII for their business, they have asked me to explore the MII and check if the same functionality can be achieve by BI-BOBJ or XI.

While going through documents on MII, I have found that MII have the same architecture like BW

the data source layer; (Same as BW)

the application layer consisting of connectors, transformation objects, and agents; (In BW we have Xmation/APD/Etc)

and the user layer consisting of display components such as applets and reports or dynamically-generated XML content.(In BI we have BEx, BOBJ).

then why do we need MII.

We can directly use Data services and BW to create dashboard using BOBJ/BEx tool.

Thanks for your help. Your help will be truely appreciated.

Regards,

Ashish

[former_member228740]

Adding to this MII is a tool which integrates Shop Floor devices/processes with the Enterprise level processes. From your query i feel that your customer is more inclined towards having reports (production, Utilizations, Batch, Energy etc) directly from the shop floor, but MII can provide more functionalities than this like integrating the production processes (some kind of production postings and goods movements) which will automatically do the posting once the product is manufactured at the shopfloor and will also reduce redundant human efforts in entering values in SAP.

MII can also give runtime data from Shopfloor which is not possible in BI.

For having reports you can use BI which will pull data from MII and you can give enhanced graphical dashboards, in addition to the dashboards which MII can provide.

[Former Member]

Hello Ashish,

MII is more and less related to Manufacturing domain whereas BI is used for cross-functional reporting

here is an extract from this article http://www.plaut.com.au/images/stories/content/PLAUT_Capability_briefs/MII_BI_-_A_winning_combinatio...

So what does Business Intelligence add to the world of Manufacturing?

Longer Term Trending;

u2022 MII focuses on providing a real time version of events on the shop floor. By its nature, this means that the data is

generally not stored. For longer term trend analysis this can create performance issues because of the volume of data

required

u2022 SAP BI is designed for the extraction and storage of high volume data. If the requirement is to analyse longer term trends

then SAP BI is the appropriate technology to use

Improved Visualisation Tools

u2022 The new suite of SAP Business Objects tools can now be used to enhance the data visualization capabilities of SAP MII

u2022 This can be done either through running BObj tools on top of SAP BW queries or directly on top of SAP MII for real time

data analysis

And what does SAP MII add to the world of Business Intelligence ?

Specialised Connectors to the shop floor level

u2022 SAP BW has native connectors to SAP systems however the shop floor layer presents special challenges in extracting

data due to their specialised data models

u2022 SAP MII overcomes these through its extractor technology designed specifically for the major shop floor systems and

historians, and it complies with ISA 95 (u201CInternational standard for the integration of enterprise and control systemsu201D)

Specialised graphical representations

u2022 Statistical Process Control and Statistical Quality Control Charts are a feature of SAP MII and represent a manufacturing

specific capability which is not easily replicated in SAP BW

Plant Level Metrics

u2022 The Manufacturing Director is focused on optimizing Business Metrics such as asset utilization, material cost and on time

supplier performance

u2022 SAP MII can add valuable data at the plant metric level such as machine availability, yields and cycle times which may

not be available in SAP BW.

PI/XI doesn't provide reports and is used for integration purposes only. MII is specialized in handling connections with shop floor. PI cannot be used as its architecture is not meant to do so.

The architecture of SAP MII is dedicated to provide robust and high performance applications for manufacturing needs.

Regards,

Musarrat