Siemens adds two CILs to Simatic IT MES

Adoption of common standards for process interoperability is said to be the key to alleviating the disconnection between combined capabilities at the manufacturing and business level. Depending on investment preferences, considerations on total cost of ownership (TCO) and architectural requirements, the customer can now choose new options from Siemens.

One new system (CIL ERP) connects Simatic IT on the plant side directly to any type of B2MML compliant ERP system on the business side. It standardises the synchronisation of master data, resource availability, schedules and production history, integrating with the MES components that share the system's service-oriented architecture. This option allows customers to plug-and-play MES functionality, and affordably scale the Simatic IT installations with a fast return on investment (ROI), and the lowest possible total cost of ownership.

The execution layer at the producing company can therefore be flexibly and seamlessly integrated with the installed business systems - without disrupting existing configurations or adding further middleware that usually create additional interfaces, risk of errors, and higher maintenance and upgrade costs.

By making use of this standard ISA-95 interface, customers can connect the Simatic IT system to the mySAP ERP system via the SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) component of SAP NetWeaver. Simatic IT has achieved 'Powered by SAP NetWeaver' certification status for the plant-to-business integration based on the combination of SAP XI-based Content Package for Order Processing Version NW04.1 and Siemens Simatic IT version 6.x (as defined in ANSI/ISA S95). Siemens includes in the certified package the transformations required to B2MML-enable Sap-XI.

The second new Simatic IT option (CIL-E2S) allows customers who have not installed a dedicated middleware such as SAP NetWeaver to realise the same interoperability messages directly between Simatic IT and SAP's IDoc (Intermediate Document), RFC (Remote Function Call) and BAPI (Business Application Programming Interface). This system is compatible with legacy SAP installations and does not require the expensive version upgrade that is often a consequence of choosing the integration and application server middleware NetWeaver.

You can find more information at www.siemens.com/simatic-it.