Shopfloor Process Automation

[siva_mohapatra]

Hi SCN Members,

I need one suggestion from you. Please suggest me which will be helpful for my upcoming project requirement.

Scenario: My upcoming project is FMCG project which is having different types of FMCG product at a single location. They do not want to run SAP  transactions manually because its time taking & requires several resource involvement. For that reason we want to go for fully automated SAP system implementation.

How we can do whole SAP process from procurement to pay, from production to delivery as fully automated. At least shop floor process automation is mandatory in initial part. From my point of view, inside ECC system we can develop some custom table & program to make production process automated but it will impact on system efficiency. To avoid this situation we can go for some external automation system like REDWOOD job.

Could you please suggest me what are the external automation system are available in market which we can use for our requirement. Which automation system will be most reliable, user friendly & cheaper. Please provide some information on REDWOOD system.

Thanks in advance.

BR

Siva Sankar

[Kevin_Hunter · Accepted solution]

Hi Siva,

There are several SAP products designed specifically for your scenario. Take a look at SAP PCo (Plant Connectivity) and SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence).

Plant Connectivity allows you to connect directly to numerous shop floor systems and equipment and will pass this data to SAP MII which can then visualize the data and/or then transact this data directly in ERP.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

[siva_mohapatra · Accepted solution]

Thanks Kevin for your reply.

Could you please guide me how SAP PCO & MII works together with some live example. If you are having some document regarding this please share with me, it will be helpful.

BR

Siva Sankar

[Kevin_Hunter · Accepted solution]

Here is a guide that Steve Stubbs wrote for PCo, its for an older version but the information still applies:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/40636abe-0d90-3110-0dbc-eb765cb60...

Basically you can use PCo to communicate with the shop floor equipment, then configure a set of conditions that will trigger an event to happen (eg if a machine completes a product it can trigger a 'Transaction' in SAP MII that sends a confirmation to ERP). MII is a toolkit that allows you to build complex interfaces and visualizations, one of its many capabilities is to pass data directly to an ERP BAPI or RFC.

I would suggest looking at the SCM 380 training class.

I have added a couple of live examples used at Hannover Messe 2014 and 2016 but if you can be more specific about what you are connecting to and trying to achieve then I might be able to be more specific.

Open Integrated Factory | Industry 4.0 with SAP - YouTube

SAP Connected Manufacturing: Industrie 4.0 Close to Action - YouTube

Kevin