Does anyone sync their Asset Hierarchy in AF from an ERP (eg. Ellipse, SAP, etc.)? If so, how do you manage it?
Does anyone sync their Asset Hierarchy in AF from an ERP (eg. Ellipse, SAP, etc.)? If so, how do you manage it?
We arer currently syncing with a custom ERP.
It is Oracle based and we have a sync service which runs at night and gets the information through EF connection to the DB and creates asset structure (and adds tags for each element) through AF-SDK.
We have many different templates (it is for renewable energy company) for different kinds of plants, generation units and equipment model.
The efirst time it is launched it creates a complete copy of the hierarchy present on the source system, then every day it searches for changes (using $AUD Oracle tables wherever possible) and sync's the AF structure.
I have a transmission customer that I wrote a synchronisation service for, to synchronise assets from their EMS. We connect to the Oracle backend, and use an approach very similar to Nicola Gargano's response. Our synch service was also made to be rules based, so the customer can add additional synchronisation rules based on different asset types (Element Templates) etc. A complete copy of the hierarchy is created on first run, and then daily changes are sync'd each night.
Yes, did do some synchronisation with an ERP system. I still find this a tricky subject functionally with many caveats.
From a technical perspective we made a custom process that 1) extracted both sets of Assets from ERP and AF, 2) created a change set from the differences (Add/Update/Delete) and 3) had some tools to implement the changes.
A simple approach could be to use Excel and PI Builder to do a frequent check of the changes and process these. With the knowledge and business rules you learned from that you can build your automated process.
I found following information. Hope these helps.
Are there any success stories concerning the use of the OSIsoft PI Suite of software and Infor's M3 ERP solution?
Integration with SAP
http://www.osisoft.com/Presentations/Keeping-Assets-Healthy--Taking-Action-Based-on-Real-time-Condition-Monitoring/