Whirlpool Corp., in Benton Harbor, Mich., needed to monitor and control quality and costs across more than 60 plants and research centers around the globe. In North America alone, Whirlpool was managing more than 100  enterprise resource planning (ERP) and legacy systems. The company wanted to enable continuous process improvement and high asset utilization while gaining visibility into manufacturing operations. Integrating and gaining visibility across varied ERP and legacy systems was a costly prospect. Some plants were still pulling plant data from hand-written notes.

So the company decided to consolidate with one ERP system that could reach down to the plant floor for critical data. The company chose SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany, as its ERP supplier, and deployed SAP’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII), an enterprise manufacturing intelligence system once known as Lighthammer, to grab plant data. “We wanted to extend the functionality of the ERP to our production people so they could improve their productivity and performance,” says Rui Fonseca, director of global development at Whirlpool. “We needed to reduce product defects and rework efforts, and we also needed to streamline information to the plant floor.”

The company began with one plant in late 2005 with the application, which, at the time, was known as xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence, or xMII. Since then, Whirlpool has deployed MII to most of its plants in North America, Europe and Asia. The system lets managers track everything from overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to tank-level data in its foam chemical tanks. With production data integrated into its ERP and visibility through a dashboard, the company saw a return on investment in two years.

Deja vu

Whirlpool’s story has become a common one as manufacturers in both process and discrete industries deploy intelligence applications software and manufacturing execution systems (MES) to manage plant data and integrate with ERP. The MES has become the translation center between the monthly batch processing of ERP and the real-time continuous data of plant operations. Controls vendors such as Invensys Operations Management (IOM), Rockwell and Siemens have developed MES offerings, and in recent years, ERP vendors have extended their tools down to the plant floor.

ERP vendors have touted the easy integration that their MES provides, while analysts have noted that best-of-breed MES suppliers have greater functionality. That’s changing. SAP, Oracle and even Microsoft have enhanced their MES offerings through research and development (R&D) and acquisitions.

Both SAP and Oracle Corp., the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based enterprise software vendor, now have MES specifically engineered for discrete and process manufacturers. SAP acquired Lighthammer in 2005 to provide manufacturing intelligence and MES-like functionality to its process manufacturing customers. SAP acquired Visiprise in 2008 to bolster its MES offering to discrete manufacturers. Oracle now offers Oracle Manufacturing Execution System for Process Manufacturing as an add-on to its Oracle Process Manufacturing System. And it also offers Oracle Manufacturing Execution System for Discrete Manufacturing (MES for Discrete).

One of the reasons plants are turning to ERP for manufacturing support is simply to get more out of their ERP deployments. “In this economy, companies are trying to do as much with their ERP as possible,” says Simon Jacobson, research director at AMR Research Inc., in Boston. “They take the MES license during an upgrade and take up the challenge of extending ERP to the shop floor.”

Even as ERP vendors are offering manufacturing support modules, they haven’t attempted to enter the control space. “Both of the big ERP vendors are developing product components for plant operations, but they stop short of going down to control,” observes Bob Mick, vice president, enterprise systems, at ARC Advisory Group Inc., in Dedham, Mass. “They don’t do control, but they do the basic data collection.”

MES tradeoffs

The relatively uncomplicated integration between the ERP and shop floor that comes with using the MES systems supplied by ERP vendors is not enough alone to justify the choice. “Vendors will sell you on the value of integration and less customization, but the reality is, if you’re buying for integration and sacrificing functionality, that’s a big problem,” says AMR’s Jacobson. “Is it module-to-module integration or business process that you want? You want to take high-fidelity functionality and integrate that.”

One of the attractions of using ERP for MES is the ability to map plant technology across multiple facilities. “We’re trying to provide a scalable solution that can compare one plant to another,  so plant managers can drill down into efficiency losses,” says Manish Modi, vice president of manufacturing and PLM development at ...