Overcoming Production Challenges With a Manufacturing Execution System (MES)

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Bottom Line: A Manufacturing Execution System can help manufacturers improve production accuracy and gain greater control and visibility across shop floors, leading to improving speed and scale of manufacturing operations.  

A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) help manufacturers overcome production challenges by giving them greater control and visibility across the core areas of their operations. Five of the most important areas where MES is helping manufacturers overcome production challenges include the following:  

  • Enables manufacturers across a diverse base of industries to create and maintain accurate Bill of Materials (BOM) supporting multiple manufacturing type definitions.
  • Automates and scales Planning and Scheduling, capacity and load analysis on equipment and labor, Finite Scheduling, and Demand Planning in response to the changing requirements of a manufacturing operation.
  • Provides a Shop Floor Control System that’s integrated to the production planning system and Real-Time Production Monitoring to know the exact status of every production job on the shop floor.
  • Helps manufacturers achieve paperless production reporting based on real-time data reporting and monitoring, shop data support, production reporting and Quality Management.
  • Overcoming the many challenges of keeping gauge calibration and integration up to date and in compliance, achieve real-time Statistical Process Control (SPC), Document Control, and achieve consistent Inspection Setup across all shop floors are additional challenges MES helps manufacturers overcome.

How Manufacturing Execution Systems Help Manufacturers Overcome Challenges To Gain Greater Control, Visibility, And Profit

When an MES is integrated to accounting, finance and all other manufacturing modules of the system, manufacturers know immediately how their decisions on the shop floor impact revenue and profits. Discrete, batch and process manufacturers’ greatest challenge is knowing how the trade-offs they’re making regarding suppliers, production scheduling, pricing, quality and compliance impact financial performance. An MES provides the shop-floor and production data and when combined with accounting and financial data, the following benefits are often achieved:

  • Eliminating costly bottlenecks across shop floors when it comes to factoring in set-up and tear-down times for every machine across all shop floors.
  • Capture, analyze and take action on real-time insights from SPC data to troubleshoot machine utilization rates and improve production effieincy.
  • Optimize production scheduling, resource allocation and maintenance regardless of plant location.
  • Improve the visbility across every phase of production, starting from raw materials through customer delivery.
  • Gain the data needed to streamline internal, regulatory and customer audits completed as part of an integrated Quality module.  

How MES Delivers Value To Manufacturers

Overcoming production challenges start when a manufacturers can track how individual orders are progressing through production, seeing how variations in order quantity and complexity impact production costs and modifying the relative resource loads by each production cell are all possible when Master Production Schedules and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are integrated. By integrating these systems during system implementation, production teams will have the latest build plans, work instructions, and the latest production scheduling information down to the cell level in time to staff them with the best possible teams. Today the best-in-class MES systems have these two workflows integrated and based on a common database, further making data integration and reporting more streamlined and accurate

Conclusion

MES delivers the most value by providing insights into how shop floor operations influence financial results. Having accounting and financial modules using the same database as an MES provides real-time visibility and control not otherwise possible. Knowing how production decisions impact profits are how MES helps manufacturers take on the greatest challenge they have – which is finding new ways to grow more profits from existing and new products.

Benefits of investing in a Manufacturing Execution System

Louis Columbus

Louis is currently serving as DELMIAWorks Brand Senior Marketing Manager. Previous positions include Director Product Management at Ingram Cloud, Vice President Marketing at iBASEt, Plex Systems, Senior Analyst at AMR Research (now Gartner), marketing and business development at SaaS start-ups.