Executive Summary

The ecosystem of products at SAP is continually evolving and expanding to cover new and exciting new areas everyday.  The thing that they all have in common is that they are based on the use of the HTML5 UI technology which makes them extremely flexible and user friendly for the end-users.  However, not all data exists or originates from the enterprise and more and more data is being generated from the machines that make up the operations layer (especially now that automation sensors and controls have come down so far in price).  The question and challenge for the business is where do you invest in upgrading existing or replacing equipment to provide the largest ROI or prevent the next big unplanned outage from occurring.  The adoption of new thinking methodologies like Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing are founded on the linkage between the enterprise and operation(s) layers.  As this linkage matures away from non-integrated approaches of manually aggregating and reporting offline data to fully automated, real-time, and web/cloud accessible data on demand will quickly identify the holes in your data.  This realization of what you actually have and what you need is what will drive re-investment in your operations technology and in turn this will accelerate the efficiency of your overall business from the ground up.

I have also recently completed and architectural deployment options document on how and why various deployments of MII in a HANA/ESP/Lumira environment make sense and how MII fits into your overall organization; the link is here: SAP MII, HANA/ESP and Lumira (Technical)

For a more technical view of "how-to" directly leverage your MII Content inside of the Lumira product see my technical BLOG here: SAP Lumira and MII (How to)

Introduction to the Products

The realization of end to end flows of data that not only drive workflows and business processes but also provide insight into priorities and live data from manually collected data enable decisions to not only be made faster but with greater confidence and transparency across the organization.  However, the data itself has to have linkage and common terms and methodologies to get at it in an intelligent and self-service way.  This means it has to be available to business and power users so that the IT department can keep up with all of the various reporting demands.

What is SAP Lumira

SAP Lumira (Data Visualization | Business Intelligence & Analytics) is the primary tool from SAP to explore big and small data in your enterprise.  This self-service data visualization software makes it easy to combine data from multiple sources, visualize it, analyze trends, and share insights on the BI platform or in the cloud.  It's primary use case is around visualization of HANA data but it can be easily extended to reach into other systems to retrieve data and this includes the SAP MII product.  There is a vast ecosystem already around this product and is available here: http://scn.sap.com/community/Lumira

What is SAP MII

SAP Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence (MII: Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) is the fastest and easiest way to link manufacturing processes with business operations to enable collaborative manufacturing and get the visibility you need to run your business in real time.  It's primary use cases are to service-enable the existing plant operations systems in a non-disruptive way to locally report and automate the integration between the enterprise back-end and shop-floor environments.  It has been around SAP for almost a decade now and has wide ranging usage across every industrial vertical and region that SAP covers.  A simple diagram of what MII is and how it's commonly used is here:

With some of the newer releases of the SAP MII product we have included additional features and functionality around UIs (http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-55991) and their development, but also around how the MII engine can expose data generically to other SAP products, like Lumira, and also to third party ISVs (like Microsoft: SAP Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) Solution for Microsoft Office 365).  Exposing manufacturing operations data can often pose challenges unless there is a common platform for generically exposing these heterogeneous and vertical systems.  As you found this document you should already know that there is an enormous community around the SAP MII product and the main landing page for this is here: http://scn.sap.com/community/manufacturing/mii

Use Case Scenario

When the Lumira product was first introduced inside of SAP we went over various ways that it could be integrated across and enterprise and linking live manufacturing/operations data with an enterprise UI tool was one of our primary scenarios.  This on-demand access to live manufacturing/operations data means that big data from HANA can be quickly combined with or drilled into the raw/live data at one or many manufacturing plant locations.  This provides powerful insights into manufacturing performance.  The full power of this tool has yet to be realized by many, but those out there who have started to use this have quickly realized it's potential.  To take this one step further, what if you combine asset health data from the existing CBM RDS (http://scn.sap.com/community/manufacturing/mii/blog/2014/09/09/let-s-set-the-record-straight-on-the-cbm-rds) solution to drive data into HANA around Asset Health monitoring.  Then you start to run and utilized our predictive modeling libraries inside of SAP HANA (PAL, R, & Infinite Insight) on this vast set of operations data that can be continually streamed into the HANA database (http://scn.sap.com/community/manufacturing/mii/blog/2014/09/02/streaming-data-in-the-sap-industrial-space-miipcohanaesp).  From this set of data (big data) you can drive and color code common failure points in various key assets and potentially visualize them in our 3D modeling product; visual enterprise.  Alongside of this you can quickly identify assets (and their location in your business) that are 'likely' to fail and require maintenance and reach into the live manufacturing operations environment to visualize the current operational usage and conditions for that asset.  Sounds pretty far out right, well this is maybe not as far away as you think...it is actually quite a common scenario that we hear from our customers, so common that folks within SAP have already done this; see below:

The above example combines all of the data and capabilities outlined so far in order to provide an integrated and holistic view across various systems and types of data in order to provide information to the end-user.  An important concept to gather from the scenario is that the components involved in this type of top-floor to shop-floor data analytics story are the same regardless if the topic is around asset health, quality, or operations/production forecasting.

I hope that you enjoyed this BLOG and please let me know if you have further questions or comments.

Thanks again,

Sam