What is MES? Manufacturing Execution Systems

the question is what is mes okay and for those of you who know what mes is i encourage you to watch this video either if you're a really advanced mes developer this should resonate if you've just dabbled this is going to be really helpful so mes is manufacturing execution system okay that's what it is or it may be called ma you may see it referred to as mom or mes but manufacturing execution system is what mes is here's the problem with mes if i say scada right supervisor control and data acquisition i always mean the

exact same thing the capabilities in a scada system scada system a scada system b scada system c they're always identical they're all the same thing they're always supervisory control and data acquisition you acquire data you visualize data you control processes you monitor processes you can configure alarms you react to alarms etc etc that is scada it's always scada functionality is always the same one of the things that we run into in in the types of projects we do is somebody will say to us we want mes right i want mes well the thing is is

mes is not a thing it's many things all right so a manufacturing execution system before i explain what it is let's talk about where it fits right so you know you guys have seen this before right we sell stuff we plan to manufacture stuff we execute the manufacturing of it we inventory it we ship it we get paid for it we do it all over again that's every manufacturer if we look at the automation stack right we have cloud we have erp we have the mes layer here we have scada and we have plc hmi

right the the famous h automation stack okay if we were going to build this out if we were going to make this this visualization representative this mes box would be the size of the entire stack okay mes there's basically four core capabilities in pretty much every mes system we call this the core four so number one you have work orders okay i take something that i plan to manufacture and i turn it into a work order that work order translates into a production run okay that on a an asset second thing is scheduling okay i

schedule work orders to be run okay the third thing this is the most common is oee overall equipment effectiveness that is how efficient are each of my assets how efficient are my areas it helps me understand how we're running i use oee if you guys want to know more about what oe is check the video up here over there down here wherever zach decides to put it but i do i go in depth explaining what is oee and why you have to calculate it and then the last thing is downtime tracking okay that's your core

four so when someone says generically mes what they're really talking about is or they should be talking about work order management scheduling work orders tracking oee and tracking our downtime oee is a q p right availability quality performance and it helps us narrow down why is it we're not producing what we want to produce okay so at a high level that's mes the problem is when someone says i want mes when someone says i want scada five different people say they want scada they're all asking for the exact same thing but when you get five

different people who asking you what an m for an mes system they're not talking about the same thing here's a list let's go ahead and put our our core for which you generally have in basically every mes system okay [Music] those are going to be in generally every system um important note hold on let me fix this important note scheduling is the first one to get dropped off of this okay so if i'm not if there's any feature i'm not going to have in the core 4 it's going to be scheduling because there are many

times where scheduling is handled in the erp system and all you're doing is consuming the schedule from the erp the second thing that would get dropped off are the work orders my work orders may be manufacturing orders that come from my routing inside the erp so i may not have core 4 in the mes proper okay you are never going to drop these two you're always going to calculate oee you are always going to track downtime but you also might add and i'm just going to list off the top of my head the other capabilities

that i know of okay so let's start with recipe management okay let's go to dqip uh digital quality inspection plans we could do a sample collection for quality we could do spc statistical process control we could do spa we could do iso 9001 compliance we could do digital work instructions well recipe management could be this could be definition this could be spec and this could be deviation tracking okay inventory consuming i'm going to get to that so the next thing is so from bomb to inventory management so that is consuming consuming whip and raw material

creating whip and finished goods um this you could also have kidding involved in this um those are just some of the addition i mean there's like 100 other capabilities okay so what is mes mes at its core is the system in the middle of your business that takes a planned uh something you sold that you plan to manufacture and it helps you execute the manufacturing of that thing okay that's what mes is the problem is is that mes isn't a product there isn't it mes is not just one um set of solutions or capabilities it

is what you're doing is you've got this big bucket of capabilities and you're only you're picking the ones that you need for your business what i listed here was just the stuff i did off the top of my head in the space i have on the board here the reality is is that when someone says mes you are always going to have oee and downtime tracking you're always going to have dashboards and you may have nothing else and then you're almost certainly going to add all these features building an mes are some of these features

i i may go you know recipe management's something is a really really critical component of our business or do we want to go ahead and transform our quality inspection plans which are basically paper driven with operators standing at the end of the line doing visual inspection and some measurements too we want to move that digital quality triggered off of certain values that we see coming off the production line right or some event that happens digital work instructions well document management so there's another one that we're missing i mean there's a there there are many many

capabilities of mes when you build mes you generally start here and then start picking from this library of other capabilities what you need to understand walking away from this is this mes is is a system that grows with the business and that mes at customer a never ever ever ever equals mes at customer b while scada at customer a is generally identical to scada at customer b