A Tale of Three Clients and Their Journeys to MES – Automation World

This is a short story about three clients, each in the early stages of an MES (manufacturing execution system) implementation. These clients are in different businesses, but their production processes and shop floor equipment are very similar. They each employ CNC machines and other related equipment to produce their respective products, and each client has plans to connect that equipment to the MES to provide an automated means of gathering critical production data that is, at present, either being recorded manually or not at all.

While each of the three clients face differing challenges in getting their production equipment connected, they each have chosen a different approach to achieve it.

The second client has fewer machines that generally fall into the 20 years old and newer category. This client is also adding new machines to their facility. They currently do not have an automated means of gathering data from the machines they have; they rely on manual collection of production data. They knew up front that they needed production data from their machines to support the MES project. They also knew that it made sense to break up the MES implementation into three phasesessentially a crawl, walk, run approach. The decision was made that as part of the first phase, we would conduct a proof of concept of machine connectivity on a small cross section of their machines. Once the interfaces were proven, the remainder of the machines could be brought online in the second phase of the project.

The third client is primarily installing new equipment. They knew that they would need to get data from the machines for the MES implementation and, based on that knowledge, they engaged early with both the OEMs and the MES team to determine how best to get the interfaces defined. This early engagement resulted in machines being delivered to the facility with an essentially plug-and-play data interface preconfigured by the OEMs.

The takeaway from these stories is that, regardless of the approach taken to machine connectivity, it can always be done to one degree or another. The clients conditions, expectations, and assumptions play a large part in easing the pain and cost of implementation of a MES/IIoT application.

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A Tale of Three Clients and Their Journeys to MES - Automation World