xMII and System Architecture

[Former Member]

In the best practices documents and other xMII related literature that I have read, the proper architecture of integration for xMII into a corporate enterprise landscape is based upon local/plant xMII servers that are connected to a corporate xMII server.

This literature does not delve into the details as to why this approach is significantly better compared to, for example, a single enterprise xMII server that retrieves data from local/plant databases that have taken care of the collection of the relevant shop floor data.

I would appreciate any feedback that can explain the best practices rationale further or provide any novel approaches to xMII's architecture of integration.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

The reason why SAP suggests the kind of architecture that the Best Practices Guide talks about is -

1. xMII talks about Intelligence - Real Time Dashboards for the Plant Users (Operators/Supervisors). This is a very common scenario where xMII adds value . Here it makes sense to have a xMII server @ the plant layer to make a very real time view possible for the user. So its mainly a bandwidth issue.

2. Another very good point the guide talks about is incase of absence of the Corporate network the plants can go on with there business as usual with xMII acting as a buffer. As soon as the corporate network's up the buffer can then be sent accross to the corporate (read SAP ERP). There have been many instances where customers have come up with these kind of requirements , This kind of a scenario becomes very relevant when one is upgrading their ERP.

The Best Practices have evolved based upon the kind of requirements xMII has seen over the years and hence it reflects what is best from an architecture perspective.

Hope this helps.

[Former Member]

David,

xMII is more efficient when it is plant specific.

When you have one xMII server speaking to multiple plant databases the intelligence part of xMII gets complicated.

When you have xMII configured for each and every plant, it is possible that you can configure your dashboards specific to that plant for the specific plant manager or other roles.

It is also possible that you can stage all the process orders to a local database during ERP downtime using xMII you can then roll all the changes into ERP once it is up.

Hope this helps...

Thanks,

Ajitha