SAP MII extends mining machine manufacturer's real-time reach
Ensuring worldwide access to enterprise data isn't a luxury for Joy Global, it's a necessity. The Milwaukee-based manufacturer of mining equipment has 16,000 employees in operations spread across six continents. For nearly two decades, it has used SAP software to run finance, customer service, the supply chain and other core operations.
Integrating the company's single instance of SAP ERP with application modules such as SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) has proved crucial in syncing complex production processes with the equally complex demands of customers. In this video, Tim Bartel, Joy Global's director of business process optimization, explains how a recent SAP MII project brought much-needed shop-floor data to production managers. Bartel spoke at the 2014 SapphireNow conference that took place in early June in Orlando, Florida.
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"We were really looking to find ways to get real-time information to the manufacturing floor, and the SAP MII tool allowed us to do a highly integrated platform between our ECC system, as well as our shop-floor data collection systems and the systems that came right off our machining centers," Bartels says in the video. "[We] pull it all together into screens that allowed our operators to make some real-time decisions in how they were working on the floor."
Bartel explains the challenges Joy Global faced in integrating older shop-floor equipment and cleansing the data. He also describes the benefits in labor productivity and on-time delivery.