You need to push production to get more out of your existing assets. To do this, you’ve tried to optimize your current process of collecting data manually and putting it into spreadsheets for analysis, but this continues to be error prone and time consuming. Not to mention, you’re constantly looking at outdated data. As a result, you’ve maybe dabbled in ways to digitize data collection or have deployed some of the latest IIoT technology in your production process with little-to-no success.
Yet, you know that without a successful digital transformation strategy where you are using data to drive actionable improvements, your company will be left behind and not able to compete. You’ve likely also deployed individual software solutions that have addressed a single gap with some success, yet have created data silos that require integration to understand context. To move forward past this stage, you need a strategy that leverages a proven approach, best practices, and a best-in-class MES platform to deliver significant improvement to performance, efficiency, planning, quality, inventory management, maintenance, and much more.
If this narrative sounds familiar, we can help. In this first part of our four-part series on best practices for a successful MES strategy, we will help you connect the dots between the business challenges you’re facing and how a properly designed MES can address your issues.
Identifying and Understanding the Business Problems an MES Can Solve
In short, most manufacturers lack access to real-time data that can be used to drive improvements in all areas of manufacturing. Manual data collection, spreadsheets, and individual point solutions that address a single gap all provide limited value and fall short of the desired goal. To change the status quo and secure the required resources, you need to present a clear picture of the business needs and opportunities. Below is an overview of the common business drivers for starting your journey along with which MES solutions can deliver the greatest value in the initial phases of implementation.
Lack of Accurate and Real-Time Visibility into Operations
Your Challenge: Due to today’s labor shortages, you’re likely running operations with a skeleton crew. This makes it impossible for operators to dedicate enough time to performing manual data collection and data entry into data analysis software or an Excel spreadsheet so that it is usable. Even if your operators can find the time, manual data is error prone and not delivered in real time, which means you’re constantly analyzing old, and possibly inaccurate, data.
Our Solution: This is the heart of what all our MES solutions offer.
Lack of Real-Time Information to Drive Production Improvements
Your Challenge: You know you’re not maximizing production capacity, but you don’t have a clear understanding of where production bottlenecks are happening and why. You also don’t have a way to quickly determine the root cause of your downtime and are struggling with determining how to decrease it.
Our Solution: Performance Management
Lack of a Real-Time Schedule Connected to Your ERP
Your Challenge: You print your daily production schedule every morning from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and hand it to your operators. This is problematic because paper schedules are rigid – you can’t optimize production scheduling to minimize time spent on changeovers or account for other unexpected changes. These issues are often compounded after the first shift when your master scheduler is gone for the day.
Our Solution: Production Management
Lack of an Automated Real-Time Workflow for the Entire Plant
Your Challenge: You’re using paper to outline your workflow diagrams, which is leading to a lack of visibility and operators running outdated workflows and generally being out of the loop.
Our Solution: Visual Workflow
Lack of Traceability
Your Challenge: You can’t easily identify which raw materials are being used in each batch, what stage of the production process products are in, and where your finished products are going. While this is an issue for any manufacturer, it is extremely problematic when those working in heavily regulated industries can’t easily produce this data.
Our Solution: Traceability
Lack of an Integrated Maintenance System
Your Challenge: You’re experiencing a lot of downtime, and costs, due to maintenance issues. You have a standalone archaic maintenance system that is not integrated with your scheduling, production, and other systems.
Our Solution: Maintenance Management
Lack of Strategy and Best Practices for Implementation
Your Challenge: You may have already taken steps to mitigate manual data collection and remove paper from your plant floor, but now you have too much uncontextualized data and struggle to make it actionable.
Our Solution: Talk to our experts
Reviewing these common business drivers and pinpointing which of these challenges you’re facing is an excellent first step to formalizing your digital transformation needs and developing a successful MES strategy. In part two of this series, we will discuss industry best practices for gaining internal alignment on the changes needed as well as how to create a project roadmap for agile implementation and how to develop the technology stack that will best meet your needs. In the meantime, learn more about our MES offerings, MES best practices, or contact us if you have any questions.
