MES insights

• A successful manufacturing execution system (MES) implementation can provide many benefits, including improved efficiency, reduced costs and enhanced quality control.
• MES software monitors, tracks and controls the entire production life cycle, providing real-time data and analytics.
• However, MES implementations are notorious for losing support from stakeholders as they hit bumps along the implementation path and are often altogether abandoned.

Today’s fast-paced, highly competitive manufacturing environments present a seemingly endless list of challenges for manufacturers. Oftentimes, these challenges, ranging from inefficient operations to the inability to accurately track production, stem from a lack of insight into operations due to the use of inaccurate and time-consuming paper-based manual data collection methods.

Attempts to digitize data or incorporate the latest industrial internet of things technology into production processes without a cohesive strategy often fail, resulting in resistance from stakeholders accustomed to the status quo.

To avoid the pitfalls of stalled manufacturing execution system (MES) projects, you need a carefully planned digital transformation strategy that leverages best practices and proven solutions.

Identify, understand the business drivers for MES

To secure the resources required to bring your digital transformation strategy to life, you first need to present a clear picture of your plant’s business needs. This means you must quantify and succinctly communicate the risks and costs associated with continuing to use your old disparate data systems and manual data collection methods and how an MES can address these issues.

Figure 1: Reviewing these common business drivers and pinpointing which challenges you’re facing is a great first step to formalize your digital transformation needs and developing a successful manufacturing execution system (MES) strategy. Courtesy: Polytron

Here are some common manufacturing and business challenges you may be experiencing that can be addressed by bringing MES technologies to the plant floor:

• Lack of accurate and real-time visibility into operations: Operators simply don’t have enough time to manually collect and log data, but even if they did, manual data is error-prone and not delivered in real time, so you’re constantly analyzing old and possibly inaccurate, data.

• Lack of real-time information to drive production improvements: You know you’re not maximizing production capacity, but you don’t have a clear understanding of where production bottlenecks are happening and why.

• Lack of a real-time schedule connected to your enterprise resource planning (ERP): Printing a daily production schedule from your ERP system for your operators is a huge source of inefficiency as it’s impossible to optimize scheduling in real time to account for unexpected changes occurring throughout the day.

• Lack of an automated real-time workflow for the entire plant: By manually outlining workflow diagrams, operators are likely running outdated workflows without visibility into operations.

• Lack of traceability: If you’re producing products for a regulated industry and not being able to easily identify where raw materials are going, what stage of the production process products are in and where your finished products go, creates compliance issues.

• Lack of an integrated maintenance system: When running a standalone maintenance system that isn’t integrated with scheduling, production or other systems, you lack the ability to contextualize maintenance with runtime, production schedule and quality issues.

Next, let’s look at how to properly prepare for an MES implementation.

Three steps to take before MES implementation

Once your leadership team is on board with the business needs for your MES projects, it’s easy to want to jump straight into implementation so you can start seeing results ASAP. But executing an MES without defining requirements, ensuring stakeholder alignment and creating a project roadmap is a guaranteed way to become one of the 70% of MES-type projects that fail or gets stuck in the dreaded pilot purgatory. To avoid this, below are three steps we recommend taking before jumping into implementation.

1. Align stakeholders and define requirements: One of the most crucial pre-implementation steps is to define exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it by hosting inclusive discussions with key stakeholders from operations, quality, maintenance, management and production that will be impacted by your project. You also need to define what the project looks like, why change is necessary and how the changes will benefit each of your key stakeholders. Without a thorough understanding of these items by your key stakeholders, you will likely face resistance to change.

2. Develop an agile implementation plan: Consider starting your implementation strategy with the highest return on investment (ROI) item identified. If your organization sees a big impact with minimal cost and time invested, it will be easier to get more support and fuel all the other phases of your MES project.

3. Perform a people, process and technology assessment: The goal of this assessment is to gain a holistic view of your manufacturing operations and understand your organization’s readiness for change. The people assessment, which is different from aligning your stakeholders, will help ensure your people are prepared to effectively handle the new technologies and processes that will be implemented.

Figure 2: Thinking through these three items before implementation will save you a lot of time, money and frustration in the long run. Courtesy: Polytron

The goal of the process and technology assessment is to determine how your existing technology infrastructure and processes will be impacted when MES solutions are deployed. This step is important as it will help you set a strategy for which technologies you can keep and develop an integration plan for and what hardware and software may need to be updated or replaced.

Next, let’s look at some key considerations to make when selecting your MES technology.

Implementing a technology stack designed to evolve

As the capabilities of MES have grown, so has the importance of having a technology stack rather than one-off solutions. While it’s easy to think about MES technology in regard to a single function or only consider solutions for an immediate problem you’re facing, this approach doesn’t take into account your long-term needs. For example, if you add performance management software to your process to measure overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), this may be a good short-term solution.

But what happens when you have a business need for quality, inventory, scheduling or any other MES function that the vendor you selected does not support? You will end up with a variety of software solutions that need to be assessed, selected, trained on, maintained and integrated to obtain contextualized information between various data silos.

Figure 3: A screen shot from TrakSYS manufacturing execution system (MES) platform from Parsec Automation Corp. Courtesy: Polytron

To avoid this issue, we recommend considering more comprehensive technology platforms that support many or all MES functionality with a common user interface, back end, dashboards and reporting

Case studies: Strategy-first MES success stories

Thinking back to the business drivers outlined at the beginning of this article, let’s look at some real-world examples of how manufacturers first identified their business needs and then set a strategy to incorporate the appropriate MES technology to solve address the challenges they were facing.

Production scheduling example: Due to the complex nature of their production scheduling, a national coffee roaster and wholesaler/distributor of coffee, tea and culinary products needed a digital solution to optimize its scheduling processes. Before diving straight into developing a solution, the company first took the time to create stakeholder alignment and gather input on best practices from the scheduling team.

Based on this initial discovery and alignment process, Polytron worked with the company to develop an algorithmic production scheduling solution that downloads production orders, routing options and product attributes from their ERP and supervisory control and data acquisition systems to develop an optimal production schedule sequence.

The software accounts for a variety of factors that are incredibly difficult to consider when performing manual scheduling including routing options, staged materials, equipment status and weighted priorities such as order due dates, time to run a job and how to minimize changeover. To allow time for operators to gain confidence in the new system, during deployment, we ran a side-by-side comparison of the old and new systems before cutting over to the new system.

Inventory tracking solution: An industry-leading industrial filtration membrane manufacturer was growing increasingly frustrated with its process for performing required semiannual inventory audits because of the limitations of the barcode tracking system. Because each filter was individually serialized with barcodes, two days of downtime and significant manual labor were needed to scan each barcode — a process that really hindered productivity and efficiency.

To optimize this process, the company brought Polytron in to develop a plan for upgrading its tracking system. Engineers implemented MES software to deliver traceability and support the use of radio frequency ID technology for tracking. With this new system, instead of needing two days to perform inventory reconciliation, the entire process takes less than three hours.

Plus, complete traceability makes it possible to more easily meet regulatory requirements, address customer concerns, comply with audits, store vital product information and quality data and provide real-time visibility to customers.

Launching digital MES tools: For one beverage manufacturer, inefficient bottling lines and aging line assets were leading to excessive downtime and waste. This was especially problematic as it was also facing immense pressure to meet growing market demand. Because it was manually reporting OEE, it lacked accurate data to determine true use and couldn’t accurately forecast the ability to meet demand. The manufacturer also had to bring in extra staff to constantly troubleshoot issues occurring on the plant floor that were difficult to identify due to the lack of real-time information and visibility.

Polytron helped the company first identify its goals and then develop a strategy to incorporate digital MES tools to address issues. The result was migrating to a system for digital data capture, which allowed for real-time, accurate production data to support decision clarity. Over a two-year period, multiple solutions were implemented across two facilities including performance management for multiple filling lines, ERP integration for production scheduling, a historian and a more comprehensive maintenance management solution. In just three months, the performance improvements covered the cost of the project, delaying the need for new plant construction.

Digital transformation pushes MES

It’s tough to be successful when you try to take on too much at once, which is why phased implementation of MES projects as part of a larger digital transformation strategy is the approach we recommend. To do this, it is best to select a partner early who will be part of your digital transformation journey from Day One. A trusted partner can help you evaluate your business opportunities and help you prioritize projects by determining which efforts will result in the highest ROI.

Finally, you should be confident that your partner will stick with you and provide support, not just during your first project, but throughout your entire multiyear, multiphased implementation.

Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this content? You should consider contributing to our WTWH Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.