In an article by Bianca Scholten written for Automation World, a couple of questions were raised:
- Who should champion a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution?
- Who should support an Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution?
In this article, Bianca sites engineering and IT as the two functions within a manufacturing environment that could potentially support an MES solution. I would also add operations and quality has two functions that need to be involved in MES solutions. The customers of MES solutions are most likely to be operations and quality. The providers of MES solutions are most likely to be engineering and IT.
In nearly 12 years of providing MES solutions, we have found that the most successful projects are when there is a great cross functional team that works together to define and provide the solution. Most of our projects have been owned by the IT organization within the factory. This works best when an IT organization is a “manufacturing IT” organization not an “administrative IT” organization.
Standards, best practices, and knowledge sharing, are all ways to help disciplines work together. But at the end of the day, the best solutions are going to come out of teams that work together to define the problem, implement a maintainable solution, and drive business results with that solution. This is way easier said than done. Maybe the source of another post :-).
In the semiconductor manufacturing sector, manufacturing owns the MES in the more successful companies and IT operates it. This relationship is driven by the factory automation systems built by manufacturing that depend heavily on the MES. The demarcation between manufacturing and IT generally is that IT owns everything from the base application layer down (network, database, computer hardware, operating systems, etc.) and manufacturing owns the application itself and the care and feeding of the application.
Engineering generally owns “master data” which feed into the MES. This includes things like part masters, bills of material, specifications, and the like. Manufacturing is one of the consumers of the master data.
This topic is interesting with a variety of solutions, most of which look to be sub-optimal.
Roland,
Thanks for your reply. I agree that manufacturing must be able to “own” the solution. If it is left to IT to make changes, add products, modify routes, etc. the solution will never be optimal. I look forward to your comments in the future.
-scott
I think it’s helpful to think in terms of ‘owner’ vs. ‘custodian’. The ‘owner’ is the person/area responsible for the business results of using that system. In essence, the owner of the data generated during production which might take the form of an Electronic Batch Record (EBR). For MES, that is clearly Manufacturing. Quality may be a secondary owner, depending on the industry.
I agree with the previous comment that master data (e.g., BOMS) are ‘owned’ by the product support groups (Engineering, Scientific, Logistics). IT then becomes the custodian, responsible for maintenance, support, etc of the hardware, O/S, database, application upgrades.
Where that gets fuzzy, is when the ‘owning’ areas don’t have sufficient expertise to change/modify/configure the application, using its built in functionality. In essence, IT might end up being the ‘fingers to the keyboard/hand on the mouse’ that actually makes the changes at the direction of the owners. Clearly not ideal.
Jim
Jim,
I agree with your comments. When MES solutions succeed, it is generally when there is an “IT Savy” operations person, or a “Operations Savy” IT person that is driving the solution. The owning parties need to be able to own/configure/change/create reports, business rules, etc. This means that they not only need to know HOW to do this, but also have to have a solution provided to them that allows them to do that without having IT people go do it for them. This is a good dialouge.