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From day one we were looking through the Custom capabilities of the SAP DM, with a very critical view and always comparing it with our beloved MII. The reason? We know that the manufacturing scenarios can be challenging in this direction and the most important, the road of migration to SAP DM goes through this path, the implementation of the existing custom logics.
This schema describes the 2 possible flows of the custom logic in SAP DM. We can trigger a custom logic from the Standard POD Plugin or from the Custom POD Plugin. Their paths are similar, but let’s dig a little more into them.
In MII we could perform custom production processes through the transactions. SAP DM offers this to us through the “Design Production Process” application where we can extend or edit the production processes.
Due to the drag-and-drop logic builder, we find it very similar to the SAP MII transactions, but it comes with many awesome features, a great intuitive user interface/experience and great detailed debugging and monitoring tools.
We can easily connect SAP DM to external web servers and use their services from the Production process extensions. These external web servers can be Destinations configured in the sap BTP or side-by-side applications deployed in Kyma Runtime.
Overall Result: You can build your custom logic in the production process design application and at the same time combine it with your custom backend implementations.
But how does your production process flow communicate with your MES? In MII it communicates with the PAPIs and the queries. Here we have a wide range of services that significantly reduce the necessity for custom queries not offered in SAP DM.
The queries are seen as the missing part of DM. Still, many services/APIs are offered to replace them with many optional/mandatory parameters that return deeply structured and detailed results instead. In our migration scenarios, we still find cases where the services/APIs are not sufficient, but the APIs are being extended and will be in a continuous process of improvement every quarter year.
On the other hand, we had in SAP MII the custom views. We will be able to build awesome custom PODs also in SAP DM. They can be built as custom UI extensions and run on the Cloud Foundry environment in SAP BTP. From there they can be used on SAP DM dashboards.
They can also communicate through the APIs with SAP DM and they can also communicate with the side-by-side applications or external servers (configured as Destinations in SAP BTP). So, the logic is achieved through the custom-developed applications, and the communication with DM is also achieved through the APIs.
