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I am constantly reminded that with risky projects, new ventures, or unknown territory that it is smart to start small and build on successes - especially when there are technical challenges.

With MES projects, there are so many factors.  I walked into our conference room yesterday and saw our guys working on a quote for a customer.  The list of risks they were talking over filled on whole white board.

We keep getting taught this lesson, but we need to start small, get something working very solidly, and then move on from there.  This approach lessons the risk for our customers and our team.

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!

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 :-).

Oracle has announced a partnership with Kepware to build OPC connectivity into their ERP solution.  This will be interesting.

As MES professionals, we are always debating “who will win?”  Is it the ERP companies, or the automation companies that will win the battle for the MES space?  This seems to be a play for Oracle that tells the world, “we are coming down into automation to get the data we want.”

I will be curious what type of data repository, or manufacturing execution system database schema Oracle has, or will, put together to house this information.  How will it be reported?  How will it be presented?  How will this data drive business logic?

I do like the acknowledgement from Oracle that there is valuable data in shop floor systems that needs to be integrated into ERP.  Perhaps one they get into some projects, they will see just how fun shop floor integration projects are!

As a side note, Kepware is an awesome company, and they have the best OPC Servers in the market. (IMHO)

Original news on MBT Magazine….

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) as defined in wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_planning_and_scheduling