Time for “Off the Shelf” Operations/ MES Solution

As I sit on another plane heading across the Pacific from California, I have time to reflect on the discussions both this week, and over the last 6 months, with leading food and beverage and process companies.

The growing trend in the MES space, (which the dominate solution is “custom solutions”), is to replace these systems with “off the shelf” products, enabling companies to focus on the core business. This trend is similar to the ERP space in the 90s, and initially in the MES space in the late 90s, and 2000s, but MES solutions of this time did not deliver the complete solution, and the eventual solutions have become unsustainable for the “operational journey”. Thousands of sites have installed MES Products from Invensys and other vendors, that are  highly successfully having run for over decade delivering significant value, but this time around there is more functionality capability people want, the architecture is not just one plant but multiple, and tolerance for custom code has significantly dropped. So why? And why now?

Reflecting on the discussions across many industries from process, mining, food, beverage, and general manufacturing, there are some common threads to the demise of “custom MES”:

·    The customer MES solutions are functionally very rich exceeding the traditional functional definitions of MESA etc with inbuilt operational practices in code, often focused on only a plant’s needs. The pace of change in operations, and pressure for new capability is growing both in capability and time to deliver.

·    Opportunities have moved from one plant to multiple plant, in order to provide the consistency and agility across the industrial landscape. Requiring significant governance, and alignment both in execution and information.

·    There is a younger generation (Gen X born 1960 to 80s) at the CIO and engineering level that have grown up with “packaged software”, and know that it works and should be leveraged.

·     Rotating staff in all roles requires faster time to experience, requiring embedded operational practices across plants.

It is also necessary to note that the MES solutions on the market where developed from a level 3 point of view yet when applied they must interact with the plant automation systems, as well as the many workers across the plants.

There were two areas of solution that contributed to the custom code:

Automation Layer Integartion:

Since the MES Products originated from level 3 specialized supplies (even if they are now apart of automation companies their origins came from standalone companies) the plant floor integration was external to MES  model using OPC etc, requiring significant custom code in the automation layer was to validate the event, and data. A sustainable solution requires  level 2 and 3 systems natively modeled, with minimal custom code as illustrated below.  The ability to configure (not code) a set of equipment templates, that model the equipment (entities) with built in supervisory capability as well as operational capability for such things as production data capture, quality sampling, utilization capture etc. Rolling these templates out over multiple sites, providing a consistent automated production event/ data capture.

Client, Human Interface:

The second area of significant coding on the first generation of MES solutions was at the client or user interface that captures manual data, at production event generation. The data  validation is required as close to source, requiring significant custom code that guides the data entry for the  user with constructive feedback. Also, the  job never seemed to finish with the operational practices continuing to change/ evolve as the companies operational practices evolved. In the above solution workflow combined with form generation and interaction, enables change and evolution in a sustainable manner.”Activity” specific interfaces and associated workflows will guide the user through the activity, and interface to MES capability capturing the required information.

The above approach is a full MES/ Operations architecture, that enables the configuration of embedded operational practices of a site and company, but in “off the shelf” products, faster solution delivery and in a more sustainable way. In many ways, this adding of realtime natural interface, combined with workflow for human interaction and embedded operational procedures extends the traditional MES capability as defined by “MESA or ISA 95” to be  a second generation that does have the opportunity to be adopted across 1000s of plants.