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?

Does Master Data Management does it Apply in Industry

 This again most automation engineers and plant personal look at me with a "blank look". But those in the business side / IT understand the need and challenge. But the real question does this have a chance to really work in the operations level 3 space, let's have discussion around this.

As Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration put it in his paper"When last did you revisit your MOM?"

"Master Data Management (MDM)

The third proof of this conservative thinking is that very few manufacturing technologists have ever heard of Master Data Management (or MDM) and fewer understand what this actually mean. Enterprise solutions have long relied on MDM systems to ensure naming consistency and data translation between disparate enterprise-level solutions. Manufacturing has not even given this a thought as can be seen by the proliferation of point-to-point interfaces between systems."

Around the 2000 time, I like many of the MES linked people were looking at how to integrate to ERP systems through EAI etc, and we found ourselves on many inter- operative meetings. Discussing how bring S95 to reality, how can lower the risk, and engineering in this interoperability. Now 10 years on the EAI approach has worked for some companies, but as one of them said to me that 10% of the challenge and inter operative communication, synching is between the ERP and MES/ Operations. Actually 90% is at the ISA level 3 and it is as another company put" the invisible barrier, limitation to achieving industrial agility".

 

Manufacturing 2.0 what is it?

If you have been watching AMR now Gartner for the past 3 years they introduced the concepts of “Manufacturing 2.0", which looked at where manufacturing and industrial architectures could go. Many of the concepts were not new, but they did a good job showing a whole picture and the components needed to make this architecture real. Too often you get a concept thrown forward but it is only part of what is required, and people miss the whole picture.

But this concept of Manufacturing 2.0 has been picked up by MESA in their push on educating the market, and they now run certification courses on the concept of Manufacturing 2.0. These courses are good for hybrid, discrete and process companies and system integrators, even if you have been doing MES for years you will learn techniques and concepts.

The diagram below shows two levels of Manufacturing 2.0, one from the enterprise level, where the manufacturing is fitting into a corporate SOA architecture. Down in the bottom right hand corner is “manufacturing”, now the second diagram drills into the next level, showing a real SOA architecture in industrial landscape.