Compliance, real-time requirements drive MES adoption
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2005 6:00:00 AM
The venerable manufacturing execution system (MES) market has finally topped the $1-billion mark, a barrier it hovered under for years, according to Boston-based AMR Research. The requirements driving the growth, however, aren't limited to the traditional needs of tracking work-in-process (WIP).
Instead, new drivers include compliance and a need for real-time plant information. These factors helped expand the MES software and services market to $1.06 billion in 2004, says AMR—up 50 percent compared to $705 million in 2001.
Alison Smith, an AMR analyst and coauthor of the MES research, says now that the "dust has settled" on many ERP implementations, "a lot of these manufacturers are discovering that if they are going to move to a demand-driven model and become more responsive, it's not going to happen unless they have some sort of view of reality from the shop floor. Where MES is on the shop floor, it provides real-time insight into inventories, consumption, and which orders are being processed."
Compliance gained relevance the last couple of years, says Smith, because of more fines in the pharmaceutical sector, and in automotive, the rising cost of warranty claims. "More manufacturers have said, 'We need to take compliance seriously and worry about audits and traceability, as well as the real costs to our business when we don't have control of our processes,'" says Smith.
Roemmer Laboratories sees MES as a means of compliance, and as a vehicle for updated manufacturing processes. The global pharmaceuticals manufacturer, based in Buenos Aires, uses an MES from Rockwell Automation's Propack Data unit to support compliance concerns, which include Good Manufacturing Practices and other U.S. Food & Drug Administration regulations. The MES now tracks all operations performed at a new plant in Argentina.
Matt Bauer, Rockwell's director of information solutions marketing, says Rockwell applies MES as part of performance solutions at the supply chain, plant, line, or machine levels. He adds that ERP vendors' solution sets are now better capable of using the information provided by MES.
Today's MES packages also may include integration software layers and workflow engines. Dan Estrada, a VP with MES vendor Eyelit, says Eyelit's MES has a software layer that can perform both event and rules management, as well as communicate with other systems. 'It's good to be event-driven, but the MES also must have a modern integration architecture; otherwise, you're only going to be event-driven within the MES domain," he says.
Smith says MES vendors such as Eyelit and others have created updated architectures, but enterprise manufacturing intelligence vendors also are making sense of plant data. The execution vendors, nevertheless, are part of the same real-time information trend. "It's a natural extension to MES," says Smith.
