Improved quality management and control
MES drives value through machine-efficiency, error-proofing the production from raw materials to finished goods.
2021 proved to be a critical time for the wide-scale rollout of industrial digital transformation initiatives. While this was already a trend throughout industrial organizations, the demand was fueled, of course, by the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented a sudden and critical requirement for production agility and social distancing.
What makes the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) different from the previous three is how quickly it’s spreading. That’s due mostly to its basic nature: it connects digital technology to manufacturing strategies, including the relationship between humans and machines. Devices and equipment are networked with software applications. Interconnected sensors gather data. And many advanced technologies are now commonplace. All those advancements sound great, but you have manufacturing processes in place and they’re making you money. All of this has fundamentally changed the relationship between worker and machine on the factory floor and throughout an organization. That’s exactly where an MES really shines.
What is MES SOLUTION
MES stands for “Manufacturing Execution System”, and to be totally literal, it’s the system that oversees the execution of manufacturing.
It describes automated systems which manage, document, and synchronize the execution of real-time physical processes involved in transforming raw materials to intermediate or finished products. The goal, with MES control and capability, is to drive greater efficiency in product execution and output.
The key advantage of the MES is the structured way in which it stores the data based on events and transactions, while also verifying in real time that each step of the execution is performed correctly.
Consider this example: the ERP has an order that requires one of our nominal recipes to be extended based on the equipment capacity and capabilities.
This means we need a new production recipe for the manufacturing floor, calculated from the nominal recipe generated in the ERP. The MES performs this logic and adjusts the required Bill of Materials (BOM), and the related process parameters, then delivers these to the production floor.
Information-Enabled Manufacturing Process
With MES, various costs such as labor, scrap, downtime, and maintenance are recorded in real-time from the shop floor.
Management teams in turn use this data to evaluate unprofitable business models and in pricing new work. Since other systems share this data, MES enables your company to increase productivity in all its production facilities.
Building the Structure
Industry 4.0 is a data-hungry model. You start with capturing large amounts of valuable data, much of which you can quickly act on with the right system in place.
Also, with Industry 4.0, the foundational principles of lean don’t go away. The data lets you take the principles to the next frontier of productivity gains.
If you are going to take steps toward a data-hungry model, an MES solution checks the boxes. But Industry 4.0 is not only about data, it is about sharing and distributing it. That is why selecting an infrastructure to support it is just as important.
MES interests you? Learn more about what an MES solution does and how to select the right one!
