Oracle. “It allows users to get visibility and get real-time measurements of efficiency, productivity and OEE.”

When ERP vendors first introduced MES solutions, many analysts noted that best-of-breed systems offered greater functionality. While some analysts still hold that view, ERP vendors have pushed to improve and enhance their MES offerings. “SAP and Oracle are adding more and more things for manufacturing,” says Ed English, director of supply chain management at KMC Systems Inc., a medical instruments contract manufacturer in Merrimack, N.H. “We used to use third-party vendors, but the products from Oracle and SAP are getting very robust. And the third parties don’t have all the interaction with the ERP that you get with Oracle and SAP.”

Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., has invested in developing its BizTalk to support small- to medium-size manufacturers. In many cases, Microsoft partners with plant intelligence companies that perform MES-like duties. The integration of plant data with business data comes down to the compatibility of Microsoft’s Windows and Office products. “On the plant floor, they’re running on Windows, and the ERP system is running on Windows,” says Dave Lassiter, U.S. director of manufacturing solutions at Microsoft.

Nalco Co., of Naperville, Ill.—a water treatment and process improvement company—uses Microsoft as its business intelligence layer and PI System from Microsoft partner OSIsoft, of Leandro, Calif., for plant intelligence. Historically, Nalco on-site technicians manually compiled customer data from thousands of process plants. The company recently replaced that time-consuming process with data collection with OSIsoft’s PI System. The data can then be analyzed, displayed and shared through Microsoft business tools such as SharePoint, PerformancePoint and Excel.

The solution eliminated most of the costly manual data collection, which improved both efficiency and accuracy. The systems also improved Nalco’s service to its customers, who now get consistent key performance indicators and analysis of their process operations that were not possible before the OSIsoft and Microsoft deployment. The bottom-line result was a 5 percent increase in Nalco revenues, a considerable amount for a $4 billion company.

Contested ground

Control vendors are competing directly with ERP vendors for the MES ground. Invensys Operations Management offers MES services as an extension of its control technology. “We took automation technology and developed an approach that measures real-time accounting and added an application that uses SAP’s MII to suck up manufacturing data into the accounting system,” says Peter Martin, vice president of business value improvement at IOM, in Plano, Texas.

One IOM customer uses Invensys MES tools to measure plant data and marry it to SAP accounting. Sasol (originally called South Africa Coal, Oil and Gas) is a South African company with operations in mining, energy and chemicals. Sasol needed new technology to measure and manage energy consumption at its steam plants. To accomplish this, the company needed to gather data from mechanical devices that read wheel flow meters. The data came from each plant’s distributed control system from Invensys. Invensys used dynamic performance measurements (DPMs) for each individual boiler. DPMs were developed for steam cost, steam quality and production rate.

This real-time performance measurement system provided consistent and accurate measurements of each plant’s performance. The data was displayed for operators on a dashboard that enabled them to identify inefficiencies and take action to improve performance. The data was integrated with Sasol’s SAP materials management and production planning modules to enable accurate forecasting. According to IOM, this automated data collection and analysis resulted in $400,000 in energy savings in the first two months from just two of the company’s five targeted steam plants.

ERP vendors have enhanced their MES offerings in recent years, bringing new functionality to the plant floor. Both SAP and Oracle have developed distinct products to address the specific needs of process and discrete manufacturing. SAP and Oracle have worked to bolster their offerings to both forms of manufacturing. “Their focus has been to invest where they’re weak,” says ARC’s Mick. The result of this investment is greater visibility, streamlined integration between plant and business data, and the ability to map a plant’s IT blueprint and deploy it at multiple facilities.

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To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-6429.

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To read the article accompanying this story, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-6430.

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