CHALLENGE
Our customer Contact Energy required CMMS data to be sent from PI to SAP.
This PI to SAP integration was a key feature in their Enterprise Transformation drive.
The requirement was to send schedule based measurements (e.g. run hours) and event based notifications (e.g. high differential pressure) automatically to SAP.
The integration had to be robust and easily configurable.
SOLUTION
The OSIsoft PI system is used at all of Contact Energy’s New Zealand power generation sites.
Dimension Software was called on to employ its PI engineering expertise to design and develop a PI to SAP integration solution. The main objective was to send PI data (e.g. events, totalizers and pressures) to the SAP PI web service.
The solution adopted was a Windows Service engine that pushes the data to the SAP web service endpoint based on configuration stored in the PI Asset Framework.
A browser-based user interface provided non-PI users with the ability to create tasks that integrate PI to SAP. From here users can create totalizer tags without having to understand the complex totalizer syntax.
BENEFITS
The benefits are wide ranging:
- Enabling Conditional Based Maintenance (CBM)
- Reducing elapsed time based maintenance
- Reducing maintenance spend
- Reducing planned outages and associated risk
- Increasing uptime of plant
NOW?
Now days, the Asset Intellect Scheduling Engine is so much more capable, configurable, easy to deploy and robust.
AF Analytics and PI Event Frames is a simple but powerful way of detecting anomalies. These can be pushed to Alarm Sentinel for a discipline engineer to evaluate. At that point he then uses the power of Asset Intellect to determine the problem then ultimately set a flag to escalate into SAP/Maximo.
Configuration is via a modern web interface. The Scheduling Engine can carry out a wide range of condition-based workflows including automated reporting, email notifications, Maximo/SAP integration, web service/REST API calls and much more.
Example integrations with Maximo and SAP include Apache Kafka topics, RabbitMQ, XML file drop, API calls via platforms such as Azure Synapse.
Check out the video below for a quick intro:
If you’re facing the same challenges at Contact Energy or would like to hear about other PI to SAP use cases we’ve been a part of, please get in touch.
