Question on MII educational video

[Former Member]

Hello MII Gurus, I have started working on MII recently came over from ABAP Developement. I was going through this MII educational video

"http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-17459" and have few doubts regarding the Downtime reports, Line Throughput, Consumer Complaints,Alarm Analysis, Process Analysis, Group Performance and work order analysis and I see there is not much MES or ERP Integration involved which is of much interesting for me to

understand the various sources  on the shop-floor, I am trying to understand is it possible to capture downtime reports and all of other data from the shop-floor systems without ERP and MES? if so what are these systems to which MII is talking to, I know MII cant integrate to shop-floor directly and do need some middleware. I also came across some customers who are not having ERP or MES implemented and they want to just capture the shop floor data via MII, what the customer can achieve by this way of approach.

Thanks,

Rajeev

[former_member228740]

Hi Rajeev

I believe that you have 2 major queries

1. Connection of MII to Shop Floor Devices
2. Connecting to MS-Access

For your second question Link sent by Jeremy would suffice and i agree with him that Connecting to MS Access does not have anything to do with OPC and Historian Concepts, instead it can be done through OLE DB Connections

For the first question - Yes you are right that the best bet is to check the Shop Floor Systems. Now to clarify Shop floor systems, they have 3 Levels, where Level 0 has the primary sensing devices like Pressure Transmitters, Temperature Transmitters, proximity switches etc which give data in electronic signals (0, 24V DC, 4-20 mA etc) which are connected to PLCs at Level 1 where the data is converted into digital (either Binary or Counts).

At this level the PLCs are in turn connected to HMI/GUIs for operators to work which is called SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition). Here OPC comes into picture- PLCs can either connect to SCADA using Industry protocols like Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP/IP, Profinet etc or they can connect using an Open standard called OPC (OLE For Process Control) which should have all the relevant drivers to connect to the PLC.

At level 2 lies the data repository which is called Historian. The historians have a back-end databases which may be RDBMS or time series. This leve can also have an MES systems

At Level 3 are all the ERP Systems and SAP MII sits as an intermediate interface between ERP and Shop Floor

Now SAP MII can connect to Historians to retrieve history data and also OPC directly to retrieve runtime data. These connections can be done through OPC HDA, OLE-DB, IDBC and OPC DA respectively.

If the customer needs a particular data on the MII system, their Industrial Automation people have to first check whether that data exists in the hierarchy of Levels or not through their system documents like I/O Address List, Instrument Lists. When this check is through it is the MII Consultants duty to see how this data can be retrieved from the MII systems.

I hope this would clarify your problem.

[jcgood25]

Some of the Demo examples you refer to like Line Throughput and Consumer Complaints actually came from real world customer experiences.  What you see represented in the demo in many cases is SQL Server, XML, or the Simulator, which provide representative information that can be correlated to each other.  In the case of the real world Consumer Complaints application it was a combination of Wonderware's InSQL historian, SQL Server, Oracle, and ECC.  The glue between systems was incorporated into the application, leveraging common date ranges, logical system/asset tags, and ID fields.

If the data doesn't exist and you need to capture certain aspects from the shop floor, database or MDO objects can be configured to store data from an html page.

With that being said, what you will need to focus in on is the source(s) of the data, which are very prevalant on the shop floor (even in the absence of a true MES or backend ERP).

[Former Member]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the clarfification.I think its the best bet to check what the customer have got on the shop floor as you said and it was a happened with me where the customer have number of Plc's and Sensors fitted on the line and they don't know what they can get out of MII by capturing the data from one Line.Is this also a part of MII Consultant to tell the customer what they should get a Historian, OPC Servers or what ever to collect the data from shop floor systems? as most of the customers dont know what they really want they just say they want to get rid of the papers. Do SAP have partner who provide this mechanism to collect the data from PLC's or Shopfloors? so it will be then an MII Consultant can integrate with those vendor applications.

What are the typical softwares which talk to these shop floor automation systems? I think every customer is interested for application software if can collect data from various sources.

Thanks,

Rajeev

[jcgood25]

When taking an inventory of the shop floor systems, keep in mind 'systems' will normally provide data storage and are in fact systems of record for that portion of the data.  If 'devices' are all that is available from the automation level (sensors, PLCs, etc.) then your connectivity and data retention will be much more complex and limited.  Any 'system' like a historian will provide the first level of device concentration, consolodation, and data retention, which in turn typically provides relevant meta-data for each point of interest (i.e. TagName, Description, Scaling Ranges).  In almost all cases a Historian will provide historical time series data along with current realtime values.  Using PCo to connect to an OPC-DA Server will only provide realtime data, so only current values, with no Historical storage unless there is an OPC-HDA Server.

There are many SI partners who frequent this discussion forum, and many of then also have experience with shop floor automation systems and MES applications.

If relevant data exists for the desired application results (make no assumptions that the 'data exists' when doing your inventory) then it is simply a matter of determining the proper path for MII connectivity.  In some cases, a bit of manual data collection from the shop floor workers is also a key requirement to store data into a database or MDO object, but at the end of the day it is the desired application needs and business case(s) that drive these decisions.

[Former Member]

Hi Jeremy,

Many thanks for the clarifications, I am trying to understand how to determine wheather we need a Historian or OPC server to connect with Shop floor systems.

I came across many slides where it leads me to different historian and OPC vendors who talks about Plant integration,What is the best approach Historians or OPC ?

Thanks,

Rajeev

[former_member196557]

Rajeev,

To add to what Jeremy has described:

OPC (OPC DA) Servers can deliver real-time event notification data through SAP Plant Connectivity (PCo) to MII, or MII can directly Query OPC Server data thru PCo on demand, and retrieve only the most recent value read by the OPC Server. The notification capability allows OPC events to trigger activities in MII via Transactions that are called from the PCo Notification.  For example, a

PLC-->OPC event trigger can cause PCo to execute a Notification to call an MII transaction that performs some activity related to the event and its associated real-time data.

The key differentiator here is the the OPC Server<-->PCo<-->MII  connection can be an Event generator, as well as a query connection, whereas the Historian<--MII or Historian<--PCo<--MII is a query only connection, and the query event must be generated at the MII end.

We have customers that use both Historians and OPC Servers to integrate with MII and PCo.  The integration tasks will determine what type of system(s) to implement.

Regards, Steve  

[Former Member]

Hi,

Many Thanks Steve / Jeremy, I am planning to integrate MS Access database with MII, as there is sample shop floor data in there. I was advised to use OPC simulation server for this purpose ( testing ) but not sure how this can be helpful for this testing and showing the sample data in dashboards or reports in MII, can you please help me understand this.

Thanks,

Rajeev

[jcgood25]

It is best to keep your forum questions more discrete and focused than to continue expanding a thread into multiple conversations.

MS Access will provide you relational data, so OPC and Historian connectivity concepts don't apply:  http://help.sap.com/saphelp_pco22/helpdata/en/69/c5ab5d9cef43578929a4434d3ad874/frameset.htm