The MES Technology Landscape

In many respects, MES deployments are similar to the ERP systems that preceded them. MES brings to manufacturing operations the efficiency and data analytics that ERP brought to financial systems.

A key difference that is sometimes overlooked, though, is the difference in transaction time frames. ERP system transactions are measured on a time scale of months, weeks, and days. MES setups have much shorter transaction time frames, measured in hours, minutes, and seconds. This is why MES must be designed for continuous availability. Even a momentary outage can break critical record chains that determine whether a product can be sold or is written off as spoilage. MES solutions also support real-time strategic decision-making, which depends on uninterrupted data collection and processing.. ¹³

Challenges of Implementing an ERP system

Today’s plants are difficult places to run an application. Typically, data is scattered across hundreds of disparate systems, many of which were developed decades ago. The cost to develop and run applications using legacy data is painfully high. It cripples application delivery efforts, limits the room for application upgrades and replacements, and encourages many users to stick with manual processes (even though there’s a broad-scale understanding that such processes are anathema to efficiency).

Corporate IT departments are seeking to standardize enterprise applications globally as a way to streamline, simplify, and overcome many of these challenges. Yet mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, and contract manufacturing are trends that create barriers to the drive for standardization. Plants often have multiple instances of different applications across their sites and business units, and many have resorted to standalone solutions to avoid the complexity of extensive integration and coordinating with corporate systems. This drives the number of disparate applications in systems even higher. ¹⁴

In the late 1990s, when MES was first deployed as a means to bridge the gap between transaction-oriented business systems and real-time production operation decisions, there was a recognition that the challenge of fitting MES software into the shop floor was taking place in unique operating environments. “Each plant per industry, per production style, has unique operating characteristics,” says Roy C. Wildeman, senior analyst at Forrester Research. As a consequence, MES developed as a fragmented market, full of specialist vendors. The combination of specialized requirements and fragmented support left manufacturers with limited options to choose from, which led many manufacturers to perform custom development as a de facto MES approach.. ¹⁵

A Change in the ERP Landscape

According to Wildeman, this picture is steadily changing. Large manufacturers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of standardized production processes, and macro drivers are propelling this idea as a more common must-do approach in many cases. Process standardization helps manufacturers pool plant capacities across the extended enterprise, better enabling the pursuit of a “virtual factory” concept and providing more strategic flexibility to respond to demand changes. ¹⁶

Consider, for example, an international contract manufacturer. As its processes are standardized globally and an MES shows excursions at any given factory (e.g., high yield fallout or another unusual trend), the company can track the excursion to its root cause, be it process steps, a bad batch of material, or a test or design issue. It can track all its material by lot, in case there is an issue with incoming components, and alert all the plants with parts from that lot of the potential issue before they use the parts. An older system of local data location would never be able to prevent other facilities from using the bad material, except by non-automated processes (e.g., SQE e-mails, phone calls). The MES solution has the potential of saving the company tens of millions of dollars alone in preventing bad material. ¹⁷

Technology advances are offering better support for multi-site MES deployment:

• Automation code is more accessible
• Code versions can be controlled across decentralized architecture
• Dashboards can aggregate disparate data sources
• Shop-floor applications can be delivered centrally as a single instance
• Hosted and SaaS deployments are lowering upfront capital requirements ¹⁸

 “Many of the controls vendors increasingly standardize their products around OPC specifications, making integration more cost effective and allowing IT to more easily abstract equipment-specific parameters into the MES layer,” Wildeman says.

What is Manufacturing 2.0?

Three years ago, AMR Research attempted to raise the technological bar for MES, coining one of 2007’s major buzzwords: “Manufacturing 2.0.” This referred to next-generation technologies such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, and user-centric interfaces on the shop floor. It called for a manufacturing service-oriented architecture (SOA) that merged product data management (PDM), process development models, and event-based supply chain collaboration with support for mobile and sensor technologies. The concept was developed in response to a growing interest in mobility, SOA-enabled applications, cloud computing, and new paradigms for factory training.

Manufacturing 2.0 was also touted as the solution to some of the problems of traditional MES systems: rigid architecture, inability to support new lean and Six Sigma initiatives, difficult and costly deployments, and trouble functioning in multiple manufacturing styles.¹⁹ But the global economic collapse has limited discussion of Manufacturing 2.0, as IT budgets have been slashed and some manufacturers have been forced to postpone or limit plans to upgrade or replace their existing MES infrastructure.

Roughly half of the installed MES software was deployed in the last six years, a sign that manufacturers are finding that MES upgrades are not easy. As more manufacturers look to standardize their MES, many are opting to rip and replace the systems, rather than upgrade existing ones. “Integration is far easier with the new MES systems that are based on Microsoft.NET Web services technology,” says Robert Parker, an analyst at IDC Manufacturing Insights. This is making the drive to standardize across multiple plants easier, and supports Wildeman’s observations.

Parker says that most MES setups handle scheduling processes very well, but for other functionality, it’s a mixed bag. He also contends that MES software has not added many truly new functions in recent years, with recent innovations focusing on visualization of the production process and analytics. ²⁰