How to Build an MES Business Case That Actually Survives Reality

Most manufacturing leaders have seen it at least once: a slide from a vendor promising “ROI in 6 months” for an MES (manufacturing execution system) or MOM (manufacturing operations management) project. The numbers look impressive, the percentages are attractive, and yet something doesn’t feel quite right. 

Operations managers worry that the assumptions don’t match the reality of their lines. IT managers see integration and data work massively underestimated. Continuous Improvement teams don’t recognize the way performance is described. Supply chain leaders are not sure how the promises translate into service and resilience.

It’s not that MES/MOM cannot generate strong returns. It can and it does when it is well framed and well executed. The problem is that many business cases are built backwards. They start from the ROI number that someone would like to see and only then look for arguments to justify it. They treat the project as a one-off investment instead of an ongoing operational capability. And they rarely show clearly how value is created along the chain from machines, through MES, up to the network of plants.

To make a business case that survives contact with reality, you need a narrative that is ambitious enough to engage leadership and honest enough to stand up to scrutiny from people who understand the day-to-day of the factory.

Why the classic MES business case feels fragile

When MES/MOM is presented purely as a cost — another system to buy, implement and maintain — the conversation inevitably drifts toward price and payback period. This is where generic ROI stories start to appear. They talk about “X% OEE improvement” and “Y% scrap reduction” without saying where those improvements will actually come from or what needs to change in the plant for them to happen.

From the point of view of someone running operations, that feels disconnected. They know that improving OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), quality or lead time is possible, but not just because the system is installed. It depends on how well machines are connected, how reliable the data is, how people use that data to take actions, how consistent processes are across shifts and plants. 

If the business case ignores these conditions, it quickly loses credibility.

There is another issue at play here as well: Many business cases treat MES/MOM as if it were a local project. They calculate benefits for one plant and stop there. In a world where manufacturing networks are increasingly complex, that is only half the story. The real strategic value of MES/MOM emerges when you can roll out a consistent model across multiple sites, compare performance, shift production and respond faster to demand or supply disruptions.

In addition, some of the most important benefits of MES/MOM are not captured at all because they don’t fit neatly into a quick payback calculation. Think of improved traceability and compliance, fewer customer complaints, better quality of decisions taken by operators, better collaboration between plants and central planning, reduced risk when launching new products, or more transparent sustainability reporting based on real production data. These are not “nice to have” side effects; they are becoming core requirements for competitiveness.

In short, the classic MES/MOM business case often fails not because it is too bold, but because it is too shallow. It promises the right outcomes without showing the path from the current reality of your machines and processes to that future state.

Building a value story from machines to network

A more robust business case starts from three simple questions: where is value lost today, how would we know that it is improving and what needs to change in the way we operate to make that improvement repeatable?

The first step is to look at value where it is created and lost — at the machines and lines. Instead of assuming generic uplift numbers, look at concrete patterns in your production, such as recurring micro-stops that nobody can fully explain, speed losses that are visible at the machine but not captured centrally, scrap peaks associated with certain formats or changeovers, energy consumption that cannot be allocated properly to products or orders. 

These are not abstract inefficiencies; they are daily realities that operators and supervisors recognize immediately.

Then, connect these patterns to the MES/MOM layer. The system’s role is to make machine behavior visible, structured and comparable over time and across plants. That means defining what you want to measure, such as downtime categories, performance losses, quality deviations, rework and energy per unit and agreeing on how you calculate it while ensuring the necessary data flows from the machines into the MES in a consistent way.

At this stage, you can start to quantify value in a way that feels concrete. For example, if you reduce a certain category of unplanned stops by a modest percentage on a critical line, what capacity do you recover? If you cut rework on a specific product family by improving process stability, what does that mean in terms of scrap, labor and material? If you avoid a handful of significant quality incidents per year because traceability and in-process checks are stronger, what risks and costs are you avoiding?

When you step up to the multi-site level, additional value dimensions appear. An MES/MOM model that is consistent across plants can:

• Shorten the time to bring a new site to a given level of performance. 
• Enable fairer benchmarking and targeted support across the network. 
• Allow planning and supply chain to make better decisions about where to produce what, with more confidence. 
• Support resilience strategies, such as shifting volumes between plants when one site faces constraints. 
• Support operator’s decisions with a consistent corporate knowledge base. 

Sustainability is another important part of this story. With reliable data from machines and MES, you can track energy, waste and emissions in a way that is granular enough to act on by line, by product and by shift. This turns sustainability from a reporting exercise into a set of operational levers.

Seen in this light, the business case stops being a single ROI number and becomes a value map. It shows where value is created along the chain from machine to MES to network, which levers you intend to pull first and how you will know whether they are moving.

From static ROI slide to living management tool

The last step is to turn the business case into something that lives beyond the steering committee where it is approved. That requires discipline, but not complexity.

First, anchor the business case in a small set of KPIs that can be measured consistently and that matter across functions like OEE or a similar productivity measure, first-pass yield or right-first-time, schedule adherence or service level, scrap/rework and a couple of sustainability indicators such as energy per unit or waste rate. These should be derived from machine and MES data, not calculated separately.

Second, think in terms of waves rather than a single “go live and done” instance. The initial wave will be about connecting key lines, stabilizing data and establishing basic performance visibility. The next wave might focus on deeper process control, quality integration or more advanced planning. Later waves could involve using MES data for AI-based analytics or digital twin initiatives. Each wave should have its own value hypothesis and KPIs, linked back to the overall business case.

Third, link the business case to routines, not just reports. Define how often you will review the key KPIs, who will be in the room, what decisions you expect to make in those reviews and how plants will be supported to close gaps. In other words, make sure that the improvements you are counting on in the business case have a place in the management system of the company.

A good MES/MOM business case does not try to remove uncertainty. It acknowledges that not every assumption will hold exactly as planned. What it does provide is a transparent, traceable logic that connects investment to operational change and operational change to value — from the behavior of individual machines all the way up to the performance and resilience of a multi-plant network.

For operations, IT, continuous improvement and supply chain leaders, this kind of business case is much more than a funding document. It becomes a shared reference point — a way to ensure that when people talk about value from MES/MOM, they mean the same thing.

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