Business Objects and xMII

[Former Member]

With SAP's the acquisition of Business Objects (BO), I know that this potentially increases MII value as a more robust reporting tool. We have both MII and Business Objects. Is there a way to integrate the two technologies so I could utilize the power of BO within MII?

[salvatore_castro]

Chip,

Any of the MII data can be displayed in BOBJ via Web Service calls to MII which allows the end user the best of both worlds for Enterprise & Manufacturing Level reporting. Everything in MII is exposed as web services and URLs...but a hybrid report that combines the two technologies is the way to go. BOBJ at the top dashboard and MII as your drill-down; I don't think there's a rival out there for the SPC and data aggregation capabilities of MII.

Sam

[Former Member]

Mind my ignorance, but what does BOBJ stand for? Business Objects...?

[salvatore_castro]

Chip,

No worries...yes it does and we're actually not supposed to refer to Business Objects as BOBJ anymore...just to lazy to type it out. Sorry for the confusion.

Sam

[Former Member]

Casual investigation into the use of Crystal Reports with MII yielded a major advantage and a couple of disadvantages:

ADVANTAGE: Nice(r?)-looking reports can be generated in a fraction of the time from traditional MII reports

DISADVANTAGES:

1. Deploying similar reports to multiple sites could be a significant headache, since the "XML and Web Services" connection definition is a string and not a set of parameters that allows the server name (for instance) to be modified easily.

2. A schema is required for any report, so this must be created manually or dynamically via XSL

Chip: Would love to hear what you end up doing or determining.

Edited by: David McKnight on Jun 18, 2008 2:04 AM

[Former Member]

Crystal Xcelsius can consume Web Service and XML data feeds, so the integration should be trivial for that range of applications. Not sure about "mainstream" BO capabilities, but I would think similar capabilities would exist.