After years of benign neglect, manufacturing execution systems (MES) are seeing a surge of attention from manufacturers who recognize their ability to help bridge the gap between factory floor operations and other systems across the enterprise. And while ERP vendors have expanded their capabilities into the MES domain, businesses that manage large volumes of data that must be integrated with other equipment or systems still rely on MES. The market has also been jumpstarted recently by the needs of regulated sectors, where compliance is enforced and production audits are par for the course.
Overall, the consensus is that the ultimate goal of an MES is to reduce manufacturing costs and achieve higher return on assets. Beyond that, things have tended to get a bit complicated.
And yet, the fog surrounding the technology and its nomenclature is beginning to lift, as vendors in niche spaces are gobbled up by larger players looking to expand their MES activity -- although some might not necessarily want to call it MES. Rockwell Automation (which recently acquired MES purveyor Datasweep) has gone so far as to invent its own definition of manufacturing execution, focusing on a set of key disciplines including performance management, data management, quality management, asset management, production, and visualization -- purposely avoiding the "MES" title altogether.
As manufacturers become more concerned with compliance management, MES is becoming increasingly critical to business continuity. Progress on the standards front is also helping vendors focus more on core features and functionality and less on communications middleware.
Vendors mentioned in this article: Brooks Software, Camstar Systems, GE Fanuc Automation, Rockwell Automation, and Visiprise . For a PDF detailing the offerings from these MES vendors, click here.
To see our entire directory of MES vendors, click here.