Deciding whether you need a manufacturing execution system (MES) is easier than ever, yet deciding how to proceed is more difficult than ever.  Sound confusing? It might be—or it might not be.

For about 20 years, people have been asking me: “If my company has modern automated controls and an effective enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, do we also need MES?” My answer is more likely to be “Yes” than ever before. In fact, Cambashi and other industry analysts’ surveys for the past five years or so have showed that a higher percentage of companies plan to buy an MES than most other major application types. 

Why does it make sense for so many companies to buy MES?  Because they have not yet done so, at least not on a widespread basis. Many manufacturers are realizing that their carefully crafted information flows have a big hole in them—between the automation and the enterprise. That missing plantwide view is key to understanding your ability to fill orders at the time, quantity, and quality the customer requires. The plant is also where you can best measure suppliers. Being in the middle of the product lifecycle, it is where engineering change requests often originate. In fact, our research has repeatedly shown that the performance of plant operations correlates closely to the performance of the business.

There may be some businesses that don’t need to buy MES, but they are the few leaders that have excellent, modern and fully implemented ERP and automated control systems. Even then, whether you need MES is largely a matter of how you define the term, and how you describe your current systems. If the definition of MES is the plantwide information system that guides, tracks and monitors the end-to-end production process, then, as one high-tech industry executive quipped, “Every production company actually has MES—it just might be manual.”

So manufacturing and production companies need MES. Most of them need a software solution to deliver an integrated view of the plant operation that also delivers a means to enforce best practices. It also delivers the information that customers want, just as much as they want the product you ship them. Given that the software in this market has been evolving and improving for over 20 years, there is a good chance that there is a commercially available solution to fit most companies.

Hard(er) questions

If we agree that production needs to be visible, well documented, and tightly controlled, the case to invest in MES is reasonably clear. Yet key questions remain that keep the market confused:

Do we need MES or do we need manufacturing operations management (MOM)? MOM is the term that has become popular due to its use in the ISA-95 standard for the integration of enterprise and control systems that provides a definition of functions and workflows for these plantwide “Level 3” systems.

What does MES mean to our company? How should we scope our requirements for the MES functionality we need?

Will we need a third solution provider for MES? Or can one of our existing solution providers offer us what we need?

Most companies will have their own specific questions as well. These may or may not include the following: How will we form the team required to assess and purchase the software? How do we best research the options? How do we make the business case to upper management? How do we evaluate the options rationally? How do we ensure the project actually delivers on the vision?

Getting to answers

Each company must answer those questions themselves. Yet my experience as an industry analyst in the MES/MOM market for years gives me a perspective to help you set up a framework to answer those questions.

MES vs. MOM: these terms are largely interchangeable, and whether a solution provider uses one or the other should not matter to you. You can find overlapping but different definitions of each term, but don’t waste your time on that. The ISA-95 Model is hugely beneficial in helping you to scope the functionality as well as the integration into your enterprise system. The ISA-95 standard can also help everyone come to a common understanding of what you are pursuing with an MES project.

Operations Management Insights: For more information, visit our updated web site for targeted content related to all things MES and MOM. Visit bit.ly/awops

Defining MES:  MES/MOM will certainly mean different things to different companies. In highly continuous process industries, the distributed control system (DCS) may ...