MESA bets new category will attract more end users to its ranks

Over the last two years, the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International has broadened the range of collaborative solutions it saw as relevant to its mandate. MESA leaders contend this broader scope, along with a new membership category aimed at individual manufacturing professionals, will attract more end users to the organization.

The new "individual" membership costs $85 annually. Carter Johnson, a MESA board member and a VP with Visiprise, a production management software vendor, says the board hopes the new category will boost end-user membership as much as tenfold over the next year.

"We've had a pretty good response from end users since we opened up the organization to the end-user community last year, but this new membership category should help take our end-user membership to the next level," says Johnson.

MESA traces its roots back to a group of manufacturing execution system (MES) software vendors looking to educate the market on MES. In early 2002, the association changed its name, broadening its scope to address information systems and business processes than span supply chain, enterprise, product life-cycle, production, and service environments.

Johnson says this approach fits in well with the need for manufacturing professionals to exchange ideas on the full range of issues in collaborative production management. "MESA is an ideal way to learn about the systems and strategies involved in anything that touches production management—from lean and Six Sigma, to serialized product genealogy, and other product life-cycle issues," he says.

Another MESA board member—John Moore, e-quality project manager with KLA-Tencor, a San Jose, Calif.-based semiconductor equipment manufacturer—says MESA membership is a good way for manufacturing professionals to learn "what's real and what's not," when it comes to the systems and business processes involved in collaborative manufacturing.

"MESA is one of the best places people in manufacturing can turn to for unbiased information on issues like product genealogy, quality management, collaborative manufacturing execution, and the interrelationships between multiple systems and processes," says Moore. "Getting involved in MESA is a huge learning opportunity."