MES

MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is a system that manages production from the organisational side. SCADA answers the question “what is the temperature in tank 3 right now?”, while MES answers “which batch are we producing, how much has been made so far, from which raw materials, and are we on schedule?”.

Typical tasks:

• receiving production orders and assigning them to lines,
• tracking production progress,
• traceability, meaning a record of which raw material batches were used to make a given product batch, which is crucial for complaints and product recalls,
• recording downtime and its causes,
• calculating performance indicators, such as OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness),
• recipe management.

MES connects the production floor (controllers, SCADA) with the company’s office systems, such as ERP, which handles orders, inventory and accounting.

Traceability example: A meat supplier informs a dog food manufacturer that one of its deliveries may have been contaminated. Thanks to MES, the manufacturer checks within minutes which dog food batches used that meat, when they were produced and which wholesalers they were sent to. Without such a system, it would have to go through paper reports from many shifts or recall all production from that period.

OEE example: MES calculates that last week the dishwashing liquid filling line was available for 90% of the planned time (the rest was downtime), ran at 95% of its rated speed, and 99% of the bottles were good. Multiplying these values (0.90 × 0.95 × 0.99) gives an OEE of about 85%. The production manager can see straight away that downtime causes the biggest losses and looks for improvements there.