Diet MES for small/medium manufacturing plants.
At the outset, In most of the plants using Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to perform the Manufacturing process and other MES functionalities, none of the plants utilizing the complete MES functionalities or their scope of manufacturing process and automation is also nominal. Furthermore, the COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) MES products are expensive.
To leverage the existing investment in SAP MII, few MES functionalities can be build in SAP MII. Please keep in mind, the decision of building a SAP MII solution to a complex MES functionality may lead to wrong implementation
Let’s see the functional structure of the MESA model for MES:
1. Resource Allocation & Status
2. Operations/ Detail Scheduling
3. Dispatching Production Units
4. Document Control
5. Data Collection/ Acquisition
6. Labor Management
7. Quality Management
8. Process Management
9. Maintenance Management
10. Product Tracking & Genealogy
11. Performance Analysis
SAP MII has rich interface capabilities as we know, so #5 is already enabled. Let’s take #11, SAP MII has build-in web enabled dynamic graphical components and logic would build on business logic services. In my earlier blog I had given a summary about how SAP MII can be a LIMS, so #7 is also possible
Lets look at the product tracking #10, it s most important demand for a any discrete manufacturing plant.
How to make product tracking enable in SAP MII? Tracking a WIP/FG/RM is a crucial need for a plant management. What we would get out of this ….
1. Product Management
Product Tracking Monitors and Tracks raw/intermediate material used in a plant and stores other associated attributes like sources, serial numbers, suppliers or batch.
2. Product Analysis
Helps in retrieving the relevant information in the event of quality problems or process changes to identify the root cause.
3. Genealogy Tracking
It records information which allows forward and backward traceability of components and their usage within each end product.
How it is possible technically in SAP MII?
In Our scenario, SAP ERP has master data, planning and scheduling is being done in ERP.
Here SAP MII plays a MES role
What we need basically is,
1. Integration with SAP ERP
2. User inputs GUI Or Label scanning inputs
3. data base to store the data locally
Lets take look at the below architecture
Here, the ideal interface technologies is IDoc, since sync the data between SAP ERP modules and SAP MII
Enable the IDoc configuration in SAP MII to download and upload necessary data from SAP MII to SAP ERP and vice versa
Material Master, Routing and BOM data need to download from SAP PP, PO, SA and VM from Material Master. From SAP SD, DN, Packing Instruction and customer Master data should download from SAP whenever data is being updated.
Let’s say, the plant had multiple line and each line has multiple work centers. We should track the product in every work center and of course, every line too,
1. Material Reception
Usually the label gets generated when raw material comes in to production plant (Material Reception), so the material reception happing at the entry level. That is raw material comes from warehouse.
The quantity of raw material would be updated back to ERP.
2. Production
Production consumption, declaration, reverse production can do in every work center. The quantity , material and production order also taken in to SAP ERP in every transaction
3. Quality Management
In QA, Lab should make sure the finished products must be in-line with the specification, Out of spec the product may send back to rework or scarp. This is most important transaction in a manufacturing plant. This transaction also sends back to SAP ERP.
To enable the above functionalities, we need to build SAP MII transaction to consume the Idoc download and upload IDoc from SAP
1. download Idoc
2. upload Idoc using B2MML structure
3. design the database table to hold the necessary production order and other master data locally
4. design the webpage to plant operator for executing the transactions
5. build the SAP MII transaction to load the Idoc data in to local database
--Subramaniyan Thangavel
