Collaboration between the plant and ERP means different things to different people. At the lowest level , collaboration can just be data connectivity – meaning, data exposure between ERP and the plant floor.

At a higher level of collaboration, beyond first level data exposure, there is integration of business process functions.

For the production planning function, a native utility of SAP, SAP-PP-PCS allows for plant floor connectivity – but caters mainly to the first type of connectivity. It does not provide collaboration between the plant floor and enterprise business processes. A product such as Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway fills this gap and adds value to an existing Plant Connectivity Objective implementation.

Plant Connectivity Objectives

Normally, this connectivity is established for exchanging plan and order execution data between the enterprise and the plant floor - related specifically to the following:

	Production Order Download;
	Production Order Status feedback;
	Production Events Monitoring;
	Up to date OEE /Resource Utilization/Quality data;
	Lot based reconciliation;
	Material Consumption data;
	Labor/Material Tracking, Traceability, etc.

What does Enterprise Miantenance Gateway Offer?

All of the above and beyond just mere data connectivity, Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway provides a “business pipeline” beween the plant and the enterprise. First, Enterprise Maintenance Gateway can convert raw data from the production floor into meta data that is useful at a business level. Second, it can trigger rules based on achieving certain threshold levels or trends in the meta data. Thirdly, the triggered rules can generate actions in a third party application such as Enterprise systems automatically. The purpose here does not end in achieving visibility of the plant to the enterprise – that is, in fact, just the beginning – the real value add is in automatic and seamless business process integration in the production planning and reporting domain between the plant and the enterprise which will eliminate unnecessary costs of paperwork, non value added labor activity, such as, duplication, rework, etc., improve efficiencies, utilization, etc.

 

Here are some examples of the ”collaboration” that occurs between the enterprise and the plant floor systems using Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway’s “ Business Pipeline” for Production Planning and Reporting :

	Recipe and Process Management
	Production Order/Reporting, Performance Analysis
	Reconciliation of Plan with Production
	Labor/Product Tracking and Traceability
	Asset Utilization, Health and Maintenance
	Alarm Management

Recipe and Process Management:

Most Enterprise systems provides a comprehensive set of tools for performing the business functions of recipe management, resource and process management. However, a feedback from the plant is required   on the process status, utilization, consumption, etc.,periodically, or upon reaching certain phases  of production, or when certain “process events” are triggered .

Production Order/Reporting, Performance Analysis:

Order dispatch information presented to the plant from the enterprise (arising out of an enterprise  process) typically needs to collaborate in real time with a plant process – namely, scheduling - due to alterations that may be needed due to real time events occurring in the plant floor such as  break downs, rework, etc. Upon the order being started in the plant, the status of the order needs  to be reported to the enterprise system on a periodical basis – could be based on pre-defined time sequence or at the end of the order or any other event the user may want to choose. This is possible by just a couple of drags and drops in a graphical user interface of Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway.

Reconciliation of Plan with Production:

Real time execution of production orders need to be reconciled with the plan and variances between the plan and the order is usually needed across lots, product ids, orders, etc., to analyze performance based on activity, production area or region within the plant. EMG provides a natural interface and a real time reconciliation of plans with orders and can deliver the output of such reconciliation to the enterprise system. Reconciliation often also involves some pieces of data that is neither available in the plant nor the destination system, but available in a third party system .

EMG can integrate information of consumption reports with material lot supplier id as part of the reconciliation process and deliver a report to the enterprise system module based on a time or event based schedule.

Labor/Product Tracking and Traceability:
EMG can be configured to track labor which relates to labor management functions of the  enterprise or tracking materials by supplier, by lot, by material id, etc., especially when rejects occur, which needs to be integrated to enterprise functions that organize material purchased  by suppliers, reconcile between contract obligations and actual rejects in the supply, etc.

Asset Utilization, Health and Maintenance:
Such functions on the plant floor include optimization of asset utilization, real time monitoring  of degrading machine health trends, initiating maintenance functions based on number of cycles, etc., which needs to be integrated to the enterprise maintenance management business processes such as devising maintenance plans, maintenance strategies, bill of materials, maintenance resource allocation, etc.

Alarm Management:
Plant floor exception control systems may identify exception situations that need to be escalated to corresponding enterprise business processes when such exceptions occur. EMG rules can signify those exception conditions.

In summary, Enterprise Maintenance Gateway provides the following:

Provides data/asset mapping between the plant floor and enterprise reference    systems based on a graphical, easily usable, point-and-click task;

Converts complex metadata structures from the plant floor side or the enterprise   side into simple hierarchical tree views;

Triggers business work flows inside enterprise systems automatically with user    -specified events, alarms, conditions, rules, etc.;

Communicates bi-directionally – production orders can be downloaded to the plant    via EMG and/or status reports can be fetched by Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway (from the plant   floor) and delivered to entrprise systems .

Can compare data (information) between plant and the enterprise – in other words,    reconciliation of data can be done before relevant data is passed to the enterprise

Makes ”on the fly” adaptations of data to differences such as units of   measurement between the plant floor and enterprise systems;

Logs messages for troubleshooting and archiving;

Makes real time performance data available based on either time based or event    based triggers;

Built-in EAI infrastructure for transport of documents and protocol management;

Guarantees information delivery to the plant floor and/or the enterprise systems  using reliability queues;

Based on standard XML technology for transfer of documents – can adapt to any  XML format dictated by enterprise systems – has a built-in XSLT engine.