The manufacturing businesses are continually improving their production processes to withstand the market rivalry. The industry forces companies to research and develop more efficient manufacturing procedures to keep their heads above the water. This is where MES comes in handy.
Manufacturing Execution Systems are the information software systems for monitoring and synchronizing the manufacturing processes execution. MES solutions put production operations on track and allow effective management of human and material resources.
Moreover, these systems address the issue of inaccurate and delayed data. As a result, manufacturers receive real-time manufacturing information. This reduces costs and significantly optimize processes.
Let’s discover 4 reasons to integrate MES software into your manufacturing business.
1. Real-Time Visibility: Use An Integrated Real-Time Data Source
The conventional manufacturing approaches – whether for Automotive, Aerospace, or any other industry – imply involving multiple data sources. Spreadsheets, paper notes, SCADA systems, and many others. Such disarray makes gathering your manufacturing data a complicated task.
Manufacturing control systems streamline your data flow and create a single database for critical business data from the plant floor. Here’s why it is essential:
- Monitoring production operations in real-time. it is often too late to fix issues when the working shift is over. MES notifies you about the malfunctioning equipment or other issues instantly;
- Managing your employees more efficiently. Exceed your plan for one product, but don’t manage to produce enough of another one? With MES manufacturing, you can see the problem in real-time and adjust your operator distribution to implement all production plans.
As you can see, MES solutions are a robust way to integrate your data and monitor it in real-time.
2. Operational Costs Reduction: Optimize Your Expenses
Manufacturing Execution System software is the key element in the operational costs cut. Now, there are two aspects of manufacturing processes MES addresses: labor and materials. Let’s consider both in detail.
Labor Costs Reduction
As we have discovered, MES enables you to control your manufacturing in real-time, meaning you get instant alerts on operational issues. This way, your engineers and operators can focus on delivering the best performance possible, while the software product provides them with accurate information about equipment state and supply stock.
What is even more crucial, your employees spend zero time on the shift production reporting. In other words, MES receives, processes, and stores your data automatically, with no employee actions involved. This saves hours of operator time you can spend on additional production time.
Material Costs Reduction
As far as material costs are concerned, MES software – especially when integrated with WMS – provides you with valuable insights into materials consumption. The real-time metrics allow you to find room for improvement and make a firm step towards lean manufacturing.
One more point to keep in mind is the plan exceeding. For instance, you purchase the raw materials for producing 200 products and schedule this for the next 2 days. Your assembly lines work more efficiently than expected and produce 150 products during the first day.
Here’s the kicker: it may take a considerable time to figure out when using a manual production reporting. At the same time, MES detects the increased performance right away in the middle of the working shift. This wins you some time to plan the additional materials purchase and – therefore – increased manufacturing effectiveness.
3. Inefficiency Detection: Discover And Eliminate Performance Issues
When it comes to enhancing your equipment efficiency, numerous production aspects reduce your manufacturing performance. These include but are not limited to the following:
- Unplanned downtime. Downtimes impact your equipment availability, meaning there is less time for operators to work with machines;
- Inefficient equipment use. Your cycle time – the time needed to produce 1 product – may suffer due to under-qualified employees or machine malfunctioning;
- Product quality. The quantity of high-quality and defective products represents the overall manufacturing quality. The higher this indicator is – the higher your production efficiency.
This is where manufacturing control systems enter the scene. MES provides you with OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) value for every single piece of plant floor equipment. It also displays the detailed manufacturing statistics on the production timeline.
This enables you to find out how performant are your operators and equipment at this very moment. Here at OLSOM, we believe that these monitoring opportunities bring your business process efficiency to a new level.
4. Operation Standards And Best Practice Enforcement
MES introduces advanced process standardization. It allows you to enforce the best practices and keep the operation sequence fixed. Consider the following situation: your product-packing station is not integrated with MES. Operators can pack the produced items however they want, and blame everything but themselves: ambiguous instructions, insufficient product data, etc.
At the same time, you can configure your MES to enforce item barcode scanning to verify that this exact product goes to that specific container. Now, hear us: there is no guarantee your operators won’t ignore instructions. However, with MES, you know for sure who is to blame.
The Bottom Line
MES software is the key to automating your manufacturing processes, monitoring production operations in real-time, and managing the human, equipment, and material resources.
If you are looking for a committed Manufacturing Execution System provider, reach out to OLSOM. Our experienced MES consultants are always fuelled for success and up for challenges. Opt for OLSOM MES solution, get a step closer to the manufacturing excellence.
