Manufacturing Execution System (MES)
Ready to take your business to the next level?
Working with paper log sheets is far too slow and error prone, but platforms like Excel or Access aren’t much better when they’re isolated. Disparate systems, even if they’re electronic, can’t share information.
Does your team spend too much time on these tasks?
- Filling out and managing paper log sheets
- Managing recipes, batch records and quality data
- Researching the status of orders during and after production
- Formulating cost variance or performance reports
- Researching root cause analysis for production disruptions or waste events
- Counting bulk material inventory manually and auditing consumption to verify accuracy
- Managing machine use and equipment set-up between products
Innorobix can help automate and integrate these functions. Our enterprise integration consultants have experience obtained through years of working with end users to solve these kinds of issues and to take businesses to the next level.
What is MES?
A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is a control system for monitoring and managing manufacturing processes. MES keeps track of critical information in real time, retrieving data from Controls Systems, Robots and employees.
Benefits of MES:
Reduce waste
Provide accurate cost information (Labor and Downtime)
Reduce inventory and aid in lean manufacturing
Core features
Data Collection in Real-Time
Storing data in a database
Data presentation to Planning and Accounting
Deliver information from ERP to Controls Layer
Detailed MES Scope:
Product definitions management
Resource Management & Scheduling
Production orders distribution
Production data collection
Production performance analysis
Production track and trace
Why MES?
In modern economic scenarios, the competition no longer takes place between Company A and Company B, but between Supply Chain A and Supply Chain B. This means that efficiency should be pursued across the entire supply chain, which cannot be obtained with the single integration of data at the strategic or commercial level. Information integration can only be done through constant alignment of all levels of each link in the chain, from the shop floor up. Only with a continuous and efficient exchange of timely and accurate information can the supply chain operate as a whole effectively on the market.
Different operators with different needs require not only different information, but also need information presented in a different way. The classic ERP interface tends to organize information for users who perform analysis on which they base decisions. In production, because everything happens faster, the information must be packaged to allow fast—if not immediate – decisions. Often it is not necessary to analyze static data of the recent past, but instead to have information on what is happening in the present and perhaps on an evolving trend related to the information in question. Different types of information, and the people who consume it, necessitates the use of a diversity of systems.
Even with all the features related to production execution in an ERP, no machine that produces a piece per cycle will probably ever communicate to the ERP that it completed the cycle. Shop floor production systems and ERP systems operate on a different interpretations of “real time” — one typical of the strategic management of the business, the other associated with the punctual execution of the process. The systems must communicate and act as a seamless whole to allow the manufacturing industry to meet the dynamic demands coming from customers, regulators, suppliers and even internal staff.
Any strategic or market change managed at the ERP level generates a volume of change about 10 times higher on production level. The production management system therefore must be specifically designed and implemented to manage both the amount and the speed of change it creates for production.
While the former primarily supports strategic decisions, the second supports the operational ones. Who knows how to make things always works for those who know why, but who knows why must rely on people who know how to to actually turn their decisions into reality. It is an essential symbiosis required to achieve any idea.