What are some of the skills and competencies that you need to excel in MES customization and configuration?

In my experience understanding landscape of solution, what is the business problem is, do you have data for solving that problem, what you would do with data and how the decision will be made and executed are important factors before you get into details of technology. Offcourse understanding functional aspect and technological options do not happen in isolation. Yet, working backward from a business problem makes sure you don’t solve the wrong problem just because it is technically feasible. Architecture is built upon that understanding.

In my experience, you definitely must think like a programmer to do development in MES and the exact tech for programming depends on vendor of MES. Yet one common denominator is understanding of database struthe cture, SQL skills and business knowledge. You can add tremendous value to business users by providing the right information in timely manner that makes MES so much valuable for Manufacturing users. The new trend in MES in bi-directional in this regard. On there are new cloud-born vendors with SaaS offering and features like low-code no-code to enable large user base to code without advance skills. Another direction is to build your MES from scratch using cloud-native services for flexibility and competitive advantage.

In my experience, Integration requires most cross-team collaboration and close monitoring. A lot of MES projects are delayed or fails due to this. Since MES doesn’t operate in isolation and it interacts with both enterpise layer and OT layers. The integration pose both functional and technical challenges. You must eststablish what would be system of record for each information, how the information would flow and to and from MES. Once you lay out the functional specifications, you need to consider the technological challenges regarding integration methods and broker, formats and identify reliable partners on other teams since integration will be an ongoing effort until it goes live and usually even beyond.

Although current MES technologies and applications are focused more to IT and it is viewed as a "software", it is very important to see and address it as an integrative system, where different mechatronical subsystems interact. So, collaboration from different disciplines is required to successful integration.

I started my career in MES configuration and modeling, even though I had a more software development focused education. I think this is the best place to start your MES skill and competency development. Get to know the manufacturing business processes that you are configuring MES for and learn how to map those business processes to the MES configuration. Once you understand how the MES is configured and how the configuration drives system behavior, you can then go on to learn MES Architecture, Development and Integration.

Have a single equipment model across all manufacturing apps (Planning, Maintenance, quality etc.). MES can be the master or import the equipment model from ERP.

The proposed methodology from R. Govindaraju and K. Putra, “A methodology for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES ) implementation,” IOP Conf. Ser. Mater. Sci. Eng., vol. 114, 2016. is very useful to consider, since they proposed five steps in the implementation from initial assessment to operation.