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 :-).
