A business system for the shop floor

Effective automation is at the core of successful manufacturing enterprises because it provides tools to manage information and processes. Yet automation is more than making individual machines, groups of machines or even entire enterprises work effectively. That definition has now expanded to tying together all the islands of information within the enterprise – from the plant floor to the business office and back again.

“Automation does not end with equipment control,” said Dennis Brandl, chief consultant for BR&L Consulting, Cary, NC, and ISA-SP88 committee chair. “It also includes higher levels of control that manage personnel, equipment and materials across production areas. Effectiveness in manufacturing companies is not based solely on equipment control capability. Manufacturing companies must also be efficient at coordinating and controlling personnel, materials and equipment across different control systems in order to reach their maximum potential.”

The age of manufacturing execution systems has arrived. It is an age when enormous pressure exists to increase productivity, control costs and manage a diverse and aging manufacturing workforce in an increasingly competitive global environment. MES is that link that pulls the manufacturing enterprise together.

“If you go to any shop floor, there are probably hundreds of different systems running,” said Kevin Prouty, senior director of manufacturing solutions at Symbol Technologies, Lynnfield, MA. “MES consolidates those custom applications, provides new ones, but it really provides the information flow for a shop floor. MES is becoming very all-encompassing: almost every function, down to the point where automation takes over and up to the point where ERP needs information. It becomes the business system for the shop floor itself.”

Prouty refers to MES as a business process bridge. “It’s a place where the people are. When you think about it, ERP is about finances and information. The automation system is about automating the machines – making the machines do what you need them to do. In between are the people. MES is about automating the people and the information that people have.”

“Many manufacturing organizations have spent millions of dollars on ERP and other business level systems to discover that these applications do not deliver the levels of detailed tracking and reporting that were promised to them,” said Matt Bauer, director of software marketing for Rockwell Automation. “MES solutions, however, unlock this detailed level production information and compliment an ERP solution to fill in the missing details at the shop floor level.”

“Over the past 10 years, we’ve shifted the manufacturing focus from improving production to improving financial performance,” said Marc Leroux, ABB, Inc.’s marketing manager for collaborative production management. “That’s one of the main benefits given by ERP vendors. Unfortunately, very few ERP implementations have realized their objectives, and one of the main reasons for that is the lack of integration between ERP systems and manufacturing systems. Many organizations are still trying to justify the ROI of the ERP implementation, and recognize that in order to do that, they need better information from the shop floor.

“The bottom line is that many of the ROI gains were taken when the ERP system was implemented; it is hard to take them a second time. But the manufacturing environment is where the opportunity for improvements will be, not just locally, but also into the overall supply chain. Driving the improvements in manufacturing can certainly gain you the respect of the corner office.”

Call it a link, a bridge or a system, MES fills specific operational needs. “MES defines a diverse set of functions that operate above automation and control systems, reside below the level of enterprise business systems and are local to a site or area,” said Brandl.

As the technology re-emerges, different vendors define and interpret MES differently. “We often find that 'operations management systems’ is a far better description for MES-type functionality than the more traditional 'manufacturing execution system,’ because it encompasses far more,” said Michael Keaton, business consultant for Foxboro, MA-based Invensys Process Systems.

Keaton defines an MES or operations management system as “an integrated software system that helps management operate one or more industrial facilities in a consistent manner, obtain feedback on how the facility (or facilities) is (are) operating, compare their operation to the desired operation or goals and make the necessary adjustments to operate the facility better.”

“Traditionally, MES has been represented as production tracking; perhaps batch management, local inventory tracking and possibly quality management,” added Leroux. “ABB tends to refer to this space as 'Collaborative Manufacturing,’ an ARC (Advisory Group) term referring to the space above the control system and below the enterprise, where applications share data and act together.”

Most vendors explain MES in some interpretative form of Brandl’s definition. But they tend to be stated with each company’s offerings and go-to-market strategies. But all agree that MES by any name resides in the space between the control system and the business/financial system.

Just because a software suite is great at financials does not necessarily mean that it handles production data from control systems well – especially in real time. In the 1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning promised to 'seamlessly’ integrate all the facets of manufacturing to provide real-world based information for managers to make responsible decisions. The promise of seamless integration was never really fulfilled.

Maybe skeptics didn’t have confidence in ERP because of recent memories of MRP and subsequent I, II and III attempts. One reason it fell short of expectations was that in the 1990s, manufacturing system integration attempts focused primarily on order management, financial accounting, customer management and shipping and receiving. Manufacturing – that place where the company’s actual products were made – was an amorphous black box with increasing overhead.

MES promises to connect the plant floor with the enterprise system and eliminate 'islands of automation.’ However, early MES was targeted too vertically. Each industry vertical had its own flavor of MES. Also, getting information into the business systems automatically was difficult, if not impossible. Skilled coding and specialized system integration were required to connect the ERP and the process control system or manufacturing areas.

The concept of MES was ahead of its time; the technology was not ready. However, interoperability of open systems, common automation platforms, XML, OPC and standards are changing the manufacturing landscape.

New solutions are said to be built on factory floor expertise. Instead of being designed to integrate in a top-down mode, today’s integration is bottom-up because it is driven by the data, information and processes owned and managed by engineers and operators. This is important because engineers and operators are in the spotlight now more than ever; they understand and manage knowledge key to the success and viability of their manufacturing businesses.

“The emphasis of many MES systems has been on data collection, and that leads to a lot of the problems that exist in the MES space today,” Leroux continued. “The problem with data is that it has no context, so decision making becomes a challenge. If two parts of a facility, or two different facilities, use the same piece of data, but use it differently, the information that is produced will be different, and therefore inaccurate – or wrong. Inaccurate information is a leading source of the distrust of integrated manufacturing and business systems; studies have been done by Aberdeen, AMR, BASF and others to support this. ABB takes the approach of bringing data into a common plant model, producing information at the source.”

“Collecting data for the sake of collecting data is useless,” said Michael Yost, marketing manager for GE Fanuc Proficy Solutions. “The only reason to collect data is to use the data to drive operations and/or business functions – be it for process improvements, compliance management, cost management or any number of other legitimate functions. Regardless of the reason, the data must be contextualized, meaning that your systems must be able to translate raw data into actionable intelligence that drives your business.”

There is a difference of opinion on what is meant by 'real time’ in many enterprises. At some plants, accounting, order entry and even the corner office consider real time to be sometime today – or even sometime this week. But real time is defined, or measured, differently at the control level, where real time actually approaches real time.

“At high levels of MES, an hour is okay, maybe a half hour,” said Prouty. “But (when) you start touching real shop floor applications, where people are depending on work instructions, real time becomes truly close to real time. You’re talking, at the worst, minutes.

“A decision that a PLC makes, that’s microseconds,” added Prouty.

“Where an operator maybe has a setup on a lathe, that has to be translated immediately into the machine,” Prouty explained. “So you take the setup information from the MES system and you actually log automatically into the machine; that has to happen in microseconds.”

“MES is that slippery buffer between the not-so-real-time of ERP and the real-time activities of a shop floor,” Prouty said.

“Access to accurate, timely production data is no longer optional, it’s essential,” Yost said. “The plant floor is turning into a strategic tool for many manufacturers who see responsiveness and agility within their plants and across their supply chains as a competitive advantage. If you accept what the system tells you and are willing to change behaviors that today you think are not broken, the system will provide significant opportunities for improvement and allow you to get more things done.”

According to Bauer, companies buy and implement MES technology because “at the most fundamental level, these information solutions create a platform for continuous improvement in the manufacturing facility. MES automates manual execution processes, enforces good production practices and coordinates production data into easily accessible and actionable information. The result is better, faster and more accurate decisions – by operators or executive management. This translates into reduced waste, lower production costs and more flexible production capabilities.

“Basically, an MES investment improves visibility into real-time production processes while increasing the ability to execute production orders more quickly and accurately. This results in increased profits and increased manufacturing flexibility – a key enabler for companies that want to pursue new strategies and /or markets,” Bauer said.

“The objective should be that I have seamless access to information throughout the manufacturing facility,” Leroux added. “We’ve been talking about MES systems doing that for 20 years, but the reality is that they are still 'islands’ inside manufacturing. With a well-designed solution, you should, for example, be able to use process or quality information as part of your maintenance, tie maintenance back to production and production to maintenance. That’s when you break down the MES barriers and have a true Collaborative Production Management system.”

“If you need to connect the plant to the enterprise, you’ll now have visibility into the actual material consumption on the plant floor (as it occurs); any quality or manufacturing problems as they happen; and you’ll have greater flexibility to see when orders come in, which areas or equipment are able to accept the order without having to go down to the plant to physically look at the equipment,” said Maryanne Steidinger, director of U.S. marketing manufacturing execution systems and solutions, Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc., Spring House, PA. “You will have a much better idea of what steps occurred and what the results are. Your yields will likely improve because you’ll know immediately if there are problems, so they can be fixed before vast amounts of defective product are manufactured (or shipped), and you can stop value-added steps to products that should be reworked.”

Claus Abildgren, marketing program manager, production and performance management, Wonderware, Lake Forest, CA, advocates establishing common definitions based on a plant model. For example, define once how to communicate with a PLC, security rules, data collection and process historian; then allow the functional component on top to provide additional functionality.

“You don’t have to do data collection four times if you have four different applications,” Abildgren said, “because it revolves around the same equipment, or plant model. 'How do I communicate with my equipment and how do I collect the data?’ It becomes a condition of a functional definition of what you are trying to achieve, based on the same plant model.”

Setting realistic expectations

“Expectations have to be set properly,” said Keaton. “MES is not nirvana and all your problems will not go away. However, given the right approach and selecting the right functions to automate and integrate, a system can be installed that will make life easier and improve operations.”

“A common expectation, which is 100% wrong, is that MES is a cure-all. It is impossible to buy a package of software and have it cure all that ails a manufacturer,” Yost added.

Steidinger agrees: “Setting expectations correctly is important. MES does not have to be a 'big bang’ implementation. Many customers are looking for just one specific functionality of MES – for example Overall Equipment Effectiveness for better asset utilization and equipment uptime. A smaller 'point’ solution can go in faster, cleaner, with less impact on the overall operation,” she said. “On the other hand, an MES to do product tracking, tracing and genealogy will be more pervasive and will require more development and implementation time, for the entire operation and all of its nuances will need to be captured in the system.”

Yost said there are obvious investments in hardware and software, networking, training and typical project-related work. “However, there must also be a commitment from the plant and the business to make an MES initiative work. Plant problems rarely, if ever, exist only in one department. So, plant leadership will need to work across departmental boundaries to ensure issues can be raised and mitigated properly.

“The organization must be committed to the success of the initiative in the short and long-term,” he added. “If it isn’t, the results and corresponding ROI will likely not meet expectations. If the organization is committed, the results have been proven to be nothing short of transformational – transforming plants and companies into profitable, world-class entities.”

• MES resides in the space between the control system and the business/financial system.
• MES is about automating the people and the information that people have.
• The only reason to collect data is to use the data to drive operations and/or business functions.
• ERP systems and MES have different concepts of 'real time.’
• Access to accurate, timely production data is no longer optional.