Friday, November 6, 2009

Curbing MESsy Shop Floor State of Affairs – Part II

MES solutions that integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise applications thus connect manufacturing to the enterprise in order to:

* Reduce costs and improve profits by collecting and communicating real-time manufacturing data throughout the product lifecycle; and
* Closely control and continuously improve operations, quality, and visibility across facilities worldwide.

By standardizing the best practices of lean manufacturing, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and continuous process improvement (CPI), such solutions should provide a real-time framework that would unite capabilities like finite factory scheduling (constraints-based), operations, quality, safety, performance management (via analytics), and enterprise asset maintenance (EAM).

Plant-level execution systems have thus far largely been adopted by big companies in a big way. The historic condition in this highly fragmented market was that offerings were too niche-oriented and offered by many small software companies. A large enterprise would have to purchase many offerings and stitch them together to get a full solution. Today, however, comprehensive packaged factory solutions that are repeatable, scaleable, and transferable are changing that dynamic.

Some Shining Examples

Some good examples in this regard would be a rare few ERP vendors with native MES capabilities, starting with IQMS and its EnterpriseIQ suite [evaluate this product]. Mid-2008, IQMS launched a new Automation Group to expand the interface capabilities of its EnterpriseIQ ERP system with manufacturing equipment on the shop floor.

Look for a separate article on IQMS down the track. In the meantime, you can find more information about the vendor here and in TEC’s earlier article entitled “Manufacturer’s Nirvana — Real-Time Actionable Information.” Also, there is an informative Enterprise Systems Spectator’s blog post on IQMS here.

Solarsoft (formerly CMS Software [evaluate this product]) would be another good ERP-MES example following the acquisition of Mattec a couple of years ago. The upcoming Epicor 9 product, which represents a complete rewrite and convergence, on the basis of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0, of the selected best-of-breed functional concepts from the respective individual products (like Epicor Vantage [evaluate this product], Epicor Enterprise [evaluate this product], Epicor iScala [evaluate this product], and so on) will feature the native MES module. Of course, some functionality within Epicor 9 will be brand new, while some modules will represent embedded third-party products (unbeknownst to the customer).

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