We are starting a series of materials dedicated to approaches to interpreting MES and its functions. We will share our minds and our approaches to major functions, how they are implemented in our products, and will describe the cases with stages of transition.
We will be very glad to find out your opinion. We are going to explore why MES is so significant and sometimes even vital for modern-day industrial production facilities.
The globalization of the economy and the associated factors of increasing effectiveness in production, shortening innovation cycles, safeguarding high quality are constantly increasing pressure on the manufacturing business.
If earlier the classic factory was defined by its manufacturing, and goods` value was measured primarily by their material components, now it implies a shifted focus from the control of product creation to control of product perception by a customer (OEM). Today, customers take it for granted that products will be of first-class quality. Anyone wishing to stand out from the competition in the future needs a strategy that offers the customer an extra added value, such as high flexibility, short delivery times, high delivery reliability, a wide range of variants, and shorter product life cycles – properties which are, basically, created not by production itself but by the processes.
The decisive potential of enterprises lies not so much in their production capability but their process capability. But the transformation of the classic factory from a production facility into a modern service center has resulted in management challenges that many companies are not yet ready to.
And this is exactly where an MES system comes into play. ISA-95 defines the following basic functions that an MES system should have:
- Data collection and acquisition
- Scheduling
- Personnel management
- Resource management
- Production tracking and dispatch
- Product traceability and genealogy
- Quality control
- Process management
- Performance analysis
- Document management
- Maintenance management
In the upcoming materials, we will focus on each of the functions mentioned above more precisely in order to completely understand what functional scope each of them covers and how to transition to the next level smoother.