SAP-OER without SAP-AII

[Former Member]

Hi,

we are thinking to track & trace our pharmaceutical products from our packaging lines up to our warehouse. We want to use SAP as the Number Range Manager and the EPCIS repository.

The packaging line serialization solution and the warehouse serialization solution we are interested in are both GS1 EPCglocal EPCIS standard compliant and both are compliant EPCIS Capturing Application.

Since there are gonna be the only applications doing EPCIS event capture, do we need a SAP-AII at the plant level or can we just let those applications directly interact with SAP-OER using the EPCIS standard ?

For now, consultants always include SAP-AII in the landscape that would force those applications to convert their EPCIS report to PML which will be converted back to EPCIS by SAP-AII before going into SAP-OER. It seems to me that's a waste of resource and make thing more complex. Am I missing something ?

[Former Member]

Hello,

We are considering other options also. As I understand there are two versions of AII.  One AII inside OER and one or more optional external or stand-alone AIIs.  Carrying your question a little further; if you just want to post an event through EPCIS, do you need any AIIs at all (internal or external.)

My understanding is originally AII served a line interface.  It also has extensions to talk to devices.  But if you already have line managers why would you have one manager talk to another just to post the event?

Now the question becomes; what are the functions of the internal AII.  I realize there are other reason to have external AIIs; such as redundancy for WAN communications, but those issue can be address in other ways.

Comments?

[Former Member]

Your assumption is right Francois. You can leverage OER with out AII

PI is required to convert incoming message to EPCIS format to process to OER via ABAP Proxy Communication. I haven't come across any HTTP or SOAP services available with in OER for point-to-point communication, but i may be wrong. Please check OER for the same.