XMII-MES integration

Question

Hi,
Has anyone worked on xMII-MES integration...
I'm exploring ways of connecting different MES softwares with xMII...
In case any of you have any idea about ways of integrating xMII and MES, plz let me know
Ur responses are valued...
Thanks,
Ajitha
Message was edited by:
        Ajitha Buvan

Answer 1

Hello Srinivas,  I would have responded yesterday but for some reason my SDN account was locked and I couldn't log in.
Our current ERP-to-MES feeds involve sending MATMAS, BOMMAT, LOIROU, LOIPRO, CLFMAS, and a few others.  The ERP is typically configured to send these upon saving their respective business object (material, BOM, routing, etc.) using change pointers, but that's not my expertise.  In some cases, we supplement the data from the IDOCs with RFC calls - e.g. revisions on the material.  We have a few other download feeds being developed now but since I don't yet know what will and won't be included in the next release, I won't mention them.
We use xMII to take the IDOCs using either the built-in IDOC listener or as a SOAP message to another xMII transaction.  The IDOCs are persisted so if any connectivity or system failures occur, we can retry them later.  Depending on the complexity of the mapping from IDOC to our MES object model, we may use only an XSLT to transform the IDOC or we may use a combination of the xMII BLS and our XSLTs to perform the transformations.  Some data enrichment may take place using the xMII BLS - some is necessary for building some MES required fields that the ERP doesn't provide and others are deployment-specific. 
The resulting XML is suitable to send to Visiprise Manufacturing - we wrap it with SOAP and call the appropriate VM web service.  Note that VM requires WS-Security which puts authentication credentials in the SOAP header and, as of xMII 11.5 SR02, the xMII Web Service action doesn't support SOAP headers.  We used the HTTP Post action and got creative with HTTP headers to inject the required SOAPAction header.
For the MES-to-ERP interfaces, we support the typical operation confirmation/scrap BAPI calls.  We also provide manual backflush if desired.  These are implemented by either synchronous or asynchronous web service calls from Visiprise Manufacturing to xMII.  VM uses JMS internally to disassociate the user thread from the confirmation to support asynchronous handling.  These confirmations are collected in xMII and batched according to the manufacturing style: for discrete manufacturing confirmations are batched by order; for repetitive manufacturing they're batched by production version.  The appropriate BAPI is then called and status reported back to VM via a status/event notification web service.
When discussing these interfaces it easy to lose track of the bigger picture - the actual business scenarios you're trying to solve.  SAP is the system of record of Materials, BOMs, Routings (not all the time!), and Orders.  Visiprise Manufacturing, as the MES, is the system of record of all WIP (work in progress) and As-Built information (exactly what components were assembled into which finished products).  Often the most valuable scenarios are those which require orchestration between both systems to produce an answer to questions like,
Q: "Where is Customer X's order?"
A: "3 units are assembled and packed, 1 is at Operation 0090, and 2 have not been started because component 123 is on back-order."
or,
Q: "Where is the component with serial number ABC and which customer received it?"
A: "Component with serial number ABC was assembled onto MES control number 999 on 3/17/2007 at 3:30PM by Joe P.  MES control number 999 was marked with serial number XYZ and completed on 3/20/2007 and moved to warehouse 001 on 3/21/2007.  It was shipped to Customer Z on 3/22/2007, ..."
and so on...
The existing IDOCs/BAPIs can answer these questions, but things start getting interesting when you explore SAP's new SOA push - in particular the ES architecture around MES.  In my opinion, it's not all there yet, but I participated in the ES MES community workshop a few weeks ago and was encouraged that SAP was listening to our ideas.  I look forward to the day when Visiprise Manufacturing and SAP web services reside together in the same registry/repository and are orchestrated via BPEL.