SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence vs. ThingWorx

SAP MII is great at what it's meant to do. It provides insight into the industrial IoT data being generated by a plant/factory and can even provide intelligent analysis as well. However, it is a bit niche and really only needs to be implemented if your use case requires those specific services.

Incentivized

ThingWorx is great if you want to create an MES-like solution for your company, but have data coming not only from the plant floor, but also from databases, azure, and others. You can seamlessly integrate those data and create reports like visuals and mashups. It is also a great solution if you have multiple plants and need to monitor everyone simultaneously and even compare results between locations. ThingWorx is not recommended if all you need is a BI solution, it is not a reporting software and it should not be used as it.

Incentivized

• Dashboard creation was made easy through the use of the integrated drag-and-drop SSCE (Self Service Composition Environment).
• The sample SVG files help with creating custom animated SVG objects.
• A wide range of KPIs can be integrated to trigger alerts and alarms.

Incentivized

• Quick monitoring of extraordinary behaviour of a monitored component
• As the Kepware tools and libraries have become more integrated, the platform has an unrivalled set of interface solutions.
• Modelling is simple enough to explain to non-specialists but very powerful in its expression.

Incentivized

• SAP MII is contained within SAP ME and that can complicate the landscape.
• As with other SAP technologies, the documentation is stored in disparate systems (support, help, notes etc).

Incentivized

• The MQTT interface needs improvement, its crashed during development of new entities on a frequent basis.
• The standard time series and trend tools are very basic and dont compare well with Top-end historians but its possible with some relative easy interfacing to use 3rd party applications.
• Care, forethought and experience is required when building complex applications, it's difficult to delete entities once the network becomes large and complex. N+Maintaining synchronicity between multiple dev and productions systems has to be carefully managed.

Incentivized

We started more than a year ago and do not plan to replace it

Incentivized

If a proper UI5-based implementation is done, the system works at best if a proper application server and database exist. However, from a customization perspective and an easy-to-implement application-from-scratch perspective, MII is top-notch compared to the other mentioned systems. SAP ME sits on top of SAP MII as a foundation.

Incentivized

Documentation on some of our implementations was lacking. As an example, creating the query that reads the tag is explained through the documentation but this only explains very specific data models. Other models are not explained and take time to debug. Customer support was willing to help and an official note was created after we found some issues with the integration tools.

Incentivized

Experienced and knowledgeable customer support executives, Thingworx is a very large product and contains a myriad of features which is not easy to remember without enough training or hands-on experience

Incentivized

SAP MII is a robust platform for data visualization and data integration. It isn't very intuitive and has the shortcomings explained throughout the review. It still uses old Java versions which is incompatible with updated versions. The SAP ME and SAP CP provide cloud-based solutions that seem to provide a more innovative approach.

Incentivized

Azure and Oracle IoT and Thingworx all provide very good support and very easy analytics when it comes to data streams. ThingWorx and Azure both have very good security and provide a robust set of capabilities. However, ThingWorx's main advantage is its built-in templates for custom apps that are industry-agnostic unlike many of its peers.

Incentivized

• MII is one of the highly successful products in manufacturing space from SAP
• Operations always got benefit out of it from a single system
• Customizations to Meet unique requirements are always possible

Incentivized

• The use of ThingWorx as a near-complete, full-stack industry 4.0 solution has been at the forefront of recent and ongoing research.