Why you need an MES ASAP

I said the other week that over 80% of organizations lack an MES, which is astonishing and for me relates to one reason and two symptoms

It has been the re-prioritizing of what's important in business, be that from the building of a great product to now a focus on the bottom-line. The symptoms are:

• getting by with an MES that's been assembled with a series of excels or sub-standard MES and
• the routing of funds to purchase an ERP solution instead.

This week, we explore why an MES is one of your priorities in today's innovation world and what are the critical components of a good one?

Let's get the show on the road….

Do you really need a Manufacturing Execution System?

An MES system simply put, increases visibility and transparency into every aspect of your production. The system is designed specifically to manage the shop floor and you’ll struggle today to find another type of system that's ready to get as hands-on with all these processes.

It helps you:

• Reduce production errors
• Decrease part lead time
• Increase productivity
• Improve quality compliance
• Reduce quality losses
• Increase production throughput

So you need to ask yourself, is there an alternative?

ERP? No, it's too removed from daily activities and far more long-term strategic resource planning orientated.

An IIoT Platform? Now this is a big one and is best handled as an entirely separate blog, but here's a brief answer; It is important to remember that Industry 4.0 Technologies are a bundle of technologies that demand cross-functional/departmental collaboration to reach their potential. MES and IIoT platforms provide the services needed to define the future of industrial automation and while MES does an excellent job today, IIoT platforms could be the true enablers for execution to deliver the smart factories of tomorrow.

And lastly, SCADA: SCADA is best at realtime visualization of process and short term historical data. They are designed to work closely with PLCs.

So, for today it's MES all the way and integrated across, not only your ERP but into your PLM too (see: PLM+MES+ERP 4.0 Working Together https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/plm-mes-erp-working-together-40-andrew-sparrow)

MES provides valuable services to the manufacturing industry by replacing legacy monitoring and management processes and introducing digitalization to your shop floor.

The manufacturing industry is going to continue to get more complex and complicated. As you continue to need greater control, compliance, time-to-market, and visibility for managing product lifecycle execution with accurate instructions, real-time data, and manufacturing intelligence, you are most likely going to need and want an MES.

And so, with that, let's start to look at what this MES is specifically going to do for you.

What's MES going to do for you?

The focus of an MES solution is the ability to follow the progress of production and related activities against a plan and to be able to modify that plan to reflect such things as changing customer orders and demand, material availability and process capability.

MES provides functionality to support:

1. Establishing the plan and maintaining schedule, by inputting your production plan and monitoring real-time progress on dashboards
2. Enforcing a repeatable process and building a systematic approach
3. Creating intelligent data for continuous improvement

Some MESs have advanced control and optimization built-in covering all aspects of supporting operations management. Having looked at material and engineering data management, we now move on to look at

How MES controls other resources and dependencies.

1. Resource Management

There are a wide variety of resources required for any particular production process to operate correctly. If any aren't in place, then the process cannot be executed. Furthermore, in many cases, it is not only the presence and availability of the dependent resource (device/equipment) but also its maintenance. The condition of dependent resources in most cases needs to be managed, not only in terms of availability and setup but also in terms of maintenance, where duty cycles are counted and trigger routine maintenance.

2. People As A Resource

Just as complex is the management of people and their different skill sets along with their personal breaks, vacations, sick days, all of which need juggling to make or achieve production targets, or even to start production at all in some cases.

More advanced MES systems come with superior operational capabilities and guidance that is included in their MES. With these solutions, with the latest electronic documentation, operators can quickly and with low-risk, move from one role to another within the team to greatly enhance production flexibility.

Mobile terminals again can be very useful in this scenario, associated with the operator wherever the resource is needed.

3. Quality Management

Disruption of production is minimized through the fastest possible defect analysis supported by the complete and specific history of the production of the defective unit, as MES records both material and process events. Statistics can be used to find the unique set of circumstances that lead to this defect occurring, and, identify any other production units that have been made in the same condition. For every production unit, MES provides complete traceability information for compliance and conformance, ensuring through management of dependencies that everything needed is correctly in place, is configured, and set up correctly. In this way, an advanced MES provides active quality management which helps assure the minimum cost of poor quality, both within the factory as well as for products out in the market.

4. Maintenance Management

MES can make a useful contribution to create a more advanced maintenance strategy, utilizing information about the accumulated work performed by each key production process. Preventative maintenance programs are created which minimize maintenance to just that which is required.

What exactly do you need in your MES?

Firstly, an in-depth portal for MOM execution.

A portal that opens the MES user interface, allows access to the dashboards, launch activities and functions. It authenticates user access privileges and provides a comprehensive view of process execution. It is a powerful tool for reviewing and fine-tuning manufacturing processes. The solution should provide a tight connection from your collaborative intelligence platform with your Manufacturing Operations & Execution Management System.

Pulled into that portal for management, operations and collaboration should be:

Executive intelligence Center

Executive visibility into and control over manufacturing operations has never been more critical. Global manufacturing and supply chain operations, increasingly complex products, and progressively higher quality expectations have made the need for enterprise visibility even more pronounced. In order to overcome this executive management challenge, decision-makers are turning to any means possible to stay current and responsive to operational issues pertaining to quality, process improvement, or supplier performance. 

Maintenance Intelligence

This offers comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into maintenance activities and performance, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Maintenance Intelligence delivers ready-to-use, maintenance-based reporting and analytics covering indicators such as maintenance orders on time, maintenance efficiency, and maintenance cost reporting. Supervisors and managers benefit from faster visibility into maintenance efficiency and productivity, MTBF, MTTR, spare parts usage, and more. Maintenance Intelligence provides visibility and functionality into all maintenance-related activities, thereby supporting continuous improvement initiatives such as Lean to help improve cost and performance.

Production Intelligence

This offers comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into production, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured production analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Production Intelligence Pack delivers ready-to-use order and production-based reporting and analytics, such as order adherence, operation duration, and first pass yield reporting. Engineers and managers benefit from faster visibility into order and production performance, including order completion (late, short, or full), actual cycle times, scrap and rework rates, and more. Production Intelligence enables offline root cause analysis and supports continuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean and Six Sigma, to reduce production costs and improve perfect order performance.

Logistics Intelligence

Logistics Intelligence offers comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into logistics operations, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured logistics analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Logistics Intelligence delivers ready-to-use reporting and analytics that cover indicators of supplier efficiency, warehouse productivity, and operational performance. Engineers and managers benefit from faster visibility into logistics performance across organizations, products, locations, time periods, and many other filters. Logistics Intelligence enables actionable insights into operational performance, thus supporting continuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean and Six Sigma, to reduce costs and improve performance throughout operations.

Manufacturing Process Intelligence

Global competition continues to place enormous pressure on manufacturers to produce goods more efficiently, faster, and with higher quality. To meet these challenges, many industry-leaders rely on operational intelligence to identify opportunities for improvement and cost reduction. Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence can be used to improve visibility across global operations, making the right information available quickly, with sufficient granularity and context to empower managers to make better decisions, faster.

Time & Labor intelligence

This offers comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into employee performance, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured employee and labor analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Time and Labor Intelligence delivers ready-to-use, labor-based reporting and analytics indicators such as overall labor efficiency, labor per product, and employee productivity reporting. Supervisors and managers benefit from faster visibility into employee efficiency and productivity, including actual labor hours, overtime hours, productive vs. idle time, and more. Time and Labor Intelligence provides visibility and functionality to identify top performers, thereby supporting continuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean, to help improve employee and operational performance.

Machine Intelligence

This offers comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into equipment, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured machine analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Machine Intelligence Pack delivers ready-to-use, equipment-based reporting and analytics indicators such as OEE, cycle time performance, and Good-Scrap-Failed reporting. Engineers and managers benefit from faster visibility into equipment states and productivity, including stop and start times, planned and unplanned downtime, and more. Machine Intelligence enables offline root-cause analysis and supports continuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean and Six Sigma, to resolve bottlenecks and improve machine performance.

Warehouse Intelligence

Warehouse Intelligence brings comprehensive, real-time visibility and historical analytics into warehouse performance, in and across plants. Offering pre-configured inventory cost and performance analytics, reports, dashboards, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Warehouse Intelligence Pack delivers ready-to-use, warehouse-based reporting and analytics such as inventory accuracy, warehouse utilization, and response-time reporting. Supervisors and managers benefit from faster visibility into warehouse efficiency and productivity, including inventory minimums and maximums, coordination with suppliers, production and shipping, and more. Warehouse Intelligence provides visibility and functionality into all inventory and tasks, thereby supporting continuous improvement initiatives such as Lean, as well as Kanban and Just-in-Sequence, to help improve warehouse cost and performance.

Quality Intelligence

This provides quality managers with out-of-the-box manufacturing analysis capabilities to help find, investigate, and solve key quality issues throughout the manufacturing process, including excessive scrap levels, supplier performance, product non-conformance, and process variability. 

Statistical Process Control

SPC helps increase overall product quality by providing embedded, actionable SPC charts to the shop floor. Operators, process and quality engineers, and supervisors are alerted when the manufacturing process trends out of control. It is then possible to take immediate action to correct or prevent problems before they become critical issues.

Reporting

Accurate and timely reporting from all plants worldwide is crucial for manufacturing enterprises that want better visibility and precise control of operations. 

Your MES should deliver rich reports and analytics on all of your manufacturing operations and performance data—delivered to the right people, at the right time, from one plant or from across the enterprise. 

Reporting Analytics Platform

Managers depend on accurate, timely reports. Legacy manufacturing operations produce huge, valuable amounts of data – yet most is trapped in data silos or “tombs.” Achieving real-time visibility into this data often requires considerable programming. 

Your MES should contain a comprehensive data warehouse product that enables manufacturers to turn plant-level data—from one or many plants—into meaningful intelligence. 

Quality

Meeting customer quality expectations has never been more critical to the success of manufacturers and their network of suppliers and contractors. When operating within a fast-paced, global environment, brand integrity demands products meet consistent quality specifications, regardless of production location. 

You'll need a MES software application that brings a unified approach to managing quality assurance and control across all phases of manufacturing operations—across your entire enterprise. 

Warehouse

Manufacturers must manage warehouse operations to not only improve accuracy and efficiency, but to also reduce Work in Process (WIP), improve throughput, support continuous improvement (Six Sigma, Lean, TQM, etc.), and enable regulatory compliance. 

Warehouse functionality tightly unifies manufacturing operations with warehouse processes. It directs people and equipment to perform warehouse processes, such as put-aways and cross-docking materials directly to and from production. 

Visual Quality Defect Tracking

For global manufacturers, quality is a more pressing issue than ever before. An effective feedback loop between shop floor operations and engineering is critical for New Product Introductions (NPI) and continuous process improvement. 

MES Visual Quality Defect Tracking helps you to speed up defect reporting and adds a powerful new visual level to your analysis, enhancing quality reviews and improving root cause analysis. 

Time & Labor

Labor is one of the single largest expenses for manufacturers, ranging from 30 to 50% of total costs. Managing time and labor effectively is critical to any business, especially in highly competitive, tightly regulated markets. In order to remain competitive and reduce costs, you need visibility and control over all aspects of manufacturing—not just equipment and processes, but employees as well—to link worker performance to key operational metrics that can drive plant success.

Production

As production processes and product supply networks continue to grow increasingly dynamic and complex, manufacturers require a new kind of Manufacturing Execution System (MES) capable of managing and synchronizing distributed global operations. Manufacturing systems must help standardize and share best practices across sites while accommodating multiple manufacturing models such as batch, hybrid, and complex discrete. In today’s highly dynamic environment, manufacturers demand a flexible and adaptive solution that works seamlessly with their corporate ERP and PLM systems.

Quality Planning 

Lean manufacturers utilizing Just-in-Time, sequenced material flows are fanatical about eliminating process delays. Unfortunately, when managing your quality program within a corporate planning enterprise application, delays occur. An extra 10 minutes per process adds up quickly after 100 cycles. Quality assurance plans with iterative, dynamic measurement and evaluation criteria can really drain system resources, adding unnecessary delays to quality improvement programs

A good MES addresses this challenge by performing iterative sampling as an autonomous, integrated manufacturing process. By avoiding the need for frequent interaction with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications, inspection plans can be quickly executed to eliminate waiting periods and manual processes.

RFID

RFID technology can dramatically improve logistics operations for manufacturing and distribution organizations. As the technology matures, organizations are looking to incrementally deploy RFID technology in areas where the investment will have a justifiable return. Whether companies are seeking to comply with RFID mandates or fundamentally improve logistical and manufacturing operations, an execution system is key to maximizing the benefits of RFID technology.

Process Builder

Manufacturers bound by rigid IT systems are challenged when faced with today’s dynamic market conditions. Frequent product or design change and ongoing industry consolidations necessitate quick changes to standardized processes. This need for greater flexibility is heightened when implementing ontinuous improvement initiatives, such as Lean or Six Sigma. Increasingly distributed production and supply chain networks add further pressure to simplify and accelerate process changes while ensuring high product quality and brand consistency.

The MES Process Builder addresses these challenges by enabling easily- configurable business processes. These processes encapsulate best practices for common functionalities, such as part assembly, material replenishment, in-line quality, or reactive maintenance. 

Issue management

In today’s hyper-competitive manufacturing world, the identification and resolution of issues is a critical element of quality control and continuous improvement. This challenge impacts more than just quality issues. Problems can arise anywhere in the manufacturing value chain – on the plant floor or shipping dock, in the warehouse, or with the maintenance team – each potentially impacting throughput, delivery, profitability, efficiency, customer satisfaction, or competitive edge.

Issue Management is more than just a quality tracking system. It lets you identify and instantly take action on any event that might disrupt or hinder manufacturing objectives – from maintaining high quality standards to implementing continuous improvement initiatives. Process improvement can be readily managed and acted upon to help ensure production is completed in a timely, effective manner.

Business Integrator

Having invested considerable time, effort, and resources in deploying Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems, global manufacturers are now challenged with how to effectively view and control their plant operations at an enterprise level. Working with multiple, heterogeneous systems environments and locations, it is difficult to reconcile different business processes and equipment protocols to operate in harmony across the enterprise while supporting a 24x7 operations environment.

A MES Business Integrator connects enterprise systems such as ERP and PLM with manufacturing operations. The Business Integrator globally integrates planning, design, and production, enabling manufacturers to become a truly adaptive enterprise.

Production Supervisor

The MES Production Supervisor for complex assembly manufacturing provides a powerful solution to gain visibility into and decision support across manufacturing assembly to achieve and sustain operational excellence. The Production Supervisor is designed for the unique production supervision requirements in complex assembly manufacturing environments. 

Global Traceability

Manufacturing companies today face extraordinary pressure to produce and deliver the right product to the right place at the right time with the right quality. At the same time, most must comply with an evolving set of regulations requiring product traceability of all materials and components. These requirements exist whether the components are built internally at a company-owned location, or if sourced externally. Increasing dependence on global supply chain partners adds further complexity. Manufacturers need better access to data, not only from their own manufacturing, quality, and warehousing systems, but also from external sources throughout their global product supply network. 

An MES application that consolidates detailed product, genealogy, and event data from multiple plants and disparate systems into a single, global repository. By combining a centralized intelligence framework and a big data repository with native Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities, Global Traceability provides an adaptive application that can fit into any IT environment. And, by leveraging existing data collection from production and logistics systems, this product offers a cost-effective solution that avoids a rip-and-replace implementation strategy. 

Machine Integrator

Increasing automation of manufacturing processes can add complexity to your plant and warehouse equipment, especially if you face a need for frequent introductions of new product lines or are consolidating production within a region. Complexity can grow, particularly when trying to manage a diverse products portfolio across multiple facilities operating with different machinery and legacy equipment. A key to survival is a system capable of rapid adaptation and of handling increasing complexity at reasonable a cost. 

Just-in-sequence

Agile manufacturers strive to meet the diversity of global customer demand while increasing efficiency and eliminating idle inventory. Best-in-class manufacturers will strive to achieve Build-to-Order (BTO) production capabilities to address the proliferation of models and options required to support mass customization. This strategy relies on a demand-driven product supply network, where materials, components, and assemblies are ”pulled“ into production as needed on a sequenced, Just-In-Time basis. Customer demand may be signaled or “pulled” with timeframes measured in minutes, requiring suppliers to operate at the highest level of agility and responsiveness.

Global Process Manager

Global manufacturing leaders are those able to respond quickly to change while maintaining process consistency and quality standards. One approach they take is to establish a Center of Excellence (COE) team to configure and distribute process improvements. By combining a COE with a global platform for manufacturing operations management that embeds Business Process Management (BPM), these leaders can simplify process distribution, governance, and monitoring, resulting in greater standardization with less effort.

Dispatching Board

Unexpected changes happen daily in manufacturing. Equipment goes down. Supplies are delivered late. Customers request last-minute changes in quantity, packaging, or product options. Dealing with these changes is further challenged with shorter product lifecycles, leaner inventories, and higher customer expectations.

Maintenance

As production and product supply networks grow in complexity, stoppages for planned and unplanned downtime become increasingly costly. Maximizing uptime requires manufacturers to optimize preventive maintenance while managing and controlling reactive maintenance. Manufacturers must improve visibility and control of both types of maintenance in order to increase return on assets while reducing the cost to maintain.

Smarter Manufacturing: People, Teams and Technology Solutions

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Andrew Sparrow

I'm a huge believer in constant change.

Standing still is going backwards

It starts with People changing their mindsets & Processes, enabled through Technology.

Innovative Products, Smarter Manufacturing all happens through Agile Revolutions - start small, empower people & scale fast.

Oh, I can "boil the ocean" with the best of them, but let's not live there. Analysis leads to paralysis. Dreaming of & waiting for perfection is the enemy of execution.

Do something, get some quick wins and start building momentum.

I like to bring attention to Innovation, Smart Manufacturing, Global People Integration & Human Sustainability - I Blog, Vlog, Podcast, host a few Live Shows and love being involved in your revolutionary programs.

I love & thrive in working with some of the world's largest companies & most innovative organizations.

I'm a big people-person & have spent my life meeting as many people & cultures as I can. At my last count, I am lucky enough to have visited & done business in over 55 countries

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