There is no substitute for good requirements, good specifications, and a good selection process in any IT project. Especially those projects that are complex and touch so many people and disciplines, like MES projects.
I often liken MES projects to building a house. It isn’t enough to go to a custom builder and give them requirements like this:
- 5 bedrooms
- 4 full baths
- 3 car garage
- 5,500 square feet
- Oh, and we want this to be our dream home.
NO, NO, NO! We all know that a builder would laugh you out of his office and say, “Come back with some architectural blueprints, some specifications, and a budget.” Even if the builder was a Design Build firm, you would expect the clock to start then, and to pay for the design of your new home!
However, so many times I see companies trying to do the same thing with MES projects. Requirements go something like this:
- OEE
- Tracking and Genealogy
- Reporting (including drill-down and ad-hoc reports)
- Schedule dispatch
- Label printing
- NO, NO, NO! There is no way the customer is going to get what they want. There is no way they are going to get an apples-to-apples comparison from different vendors.
In coming posts, I will explore how manufacturing companies can do a better job of laying out requirements. Who knows, maybe we will even post some templates!
I totally agree. But things are probably worse. When a family goes to a builder and says, “5 Bedrooms, 4 Full Baths,…”, there is an implicit understanding of what a ‘Bedroom’ and ‘Bath’ means, what it is supposed to do and what not. Unfortunately in the MES domain, the boundary line between MES and ERP itself is fuzzy, and I have seen customers wanting to implement a specific funcationality, which I thought would be ERP’s business, in MES, and vice versa. So, it would be good to hear your thoughts on how organizations should partition their functionality between MES and ERP. We call this ‘application rationalization’. Deciding what to put in which bucket. In fact, in my opinion, this decision is perhaps the greatest influencer in selecting the right MES!
Shripad,
Thanks for the comment. You are right, this is always the hard part. Fortunately, there are some standards that are starting to define the transactions, terminology, etc. for this interaction. Have you heard of the ISA S95 standard?
These standards will help the larger companies where the lines of demarcation between systems can be drawn with a little more certainty. In most companies, the rationalization between systems, master data, etc. is very difficult.
Perhaps it would be a good exercise for me to define what the best practices are in this area and make that available on the blog.
Thanks again.
-scott