SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII)

So, how is your business today? I hope yesterday's blog on the SAP xApp Lean Planning and Operations (SAP xLPO) has made you gain better insights on how to have manufacturing operations with less wastes and more profit.

Today, let us still focus on the manufacturing aspect of a business but this time we will take the aspect to a broader sense by including integration and business intelligence.

The SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) is an application which makes it possible to connect manufacturing with the processes in a business enterprise. Because it also helps deliver actionable intelligence to production personnel, the company will be able to achieve superior performance in production.

Today's business moves very quickly as they are driven by information and information comes from ubiquitous data with the internet and other advance communications technology as conduit. The success or failure of a manufacturer depends on how he can manage his business in real time as information exchange among manufacturing and supply networks and the end customers need to take place any minute of the day (yes, even in one's sleep!).

SAP xMII is a great tool to help a manufacturer become adaptive to the constantly changing industry trends by helping profitably replenish his supply network and responding dynamically to the demands.

Let's break down SAP xMII into its two major parts. The Manufacturing Integration integrates the plant process and business operations seamlessly. Many companies find themselves manually intervening to enter production batch data when they are not implementing factory and ERP systems integration. This manual process is both time consuming and very costly as the company will need to spend more on staff hour salary. Also, because it is a manual operation, it is more prone to human error resulting data redundancy and inaccuracies. SAP xMII can make rapid integration between the mySAP ERP solution and other manufacturing software applications.

On the other part, the Manufacturing Intelligence, SAP xMII comes with manufacturing dashboards leveraging on a powerful real time analytics engine. The rich analytics feature aggregates data in order to deliver actionable intelligence to the staff behind the company. The nicely graphical and easy to use dashboards provide views so one can have visualization of plant floor systems, monitor production for Six Sigma violations and other exceptions, and dig deep into problems to know the root causes and have effective measures in correcting them. The dashboard also displays key performance indicators (KPI) which be configured to suit the organization's needs. The system can also be set to alert key people for expeditious actions under certain circumstances.

Implementing the SAP xMII may be cost effective as it takes advantage of the company's existing IT infrastructure so there is no need to spend extra tools because there is building of a system from scratch. Overall, investing in SAP xMII definitely help in manufacturing performance at the same time decrease total cost of ownership.

I wish you a productive day! Tomorrow, another SAP xAPP.