Manufacturing execution system

And then obviously we need to connect with, you know, team center, windshield, PLM software.

We need to connect with ERP, MES.

I want to take a quick second.

I want to translate this for my audience.

The idea that deploying the right technology is itself the transformation.

You implement the MES and production visibility improves.

You deploy the predictive maintenance AI and unplanned downtime falls.

You connect the supply chain platform and supplier performance rises.

This is where execution software can help.

A manufacturing execution system, or MES, records production activity against work orders and operations, giving the station a context for the material use it needs to capture.

The business system handles a different set of transactions.

Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, connects purchasing, inventory, and orders, including material issues that account for stock assigned to production before anyone actually uses it.

Depending on your setup, issuing seals to a work order can reduce warehouse stock without establishing that an operator fitted those seals into any particular pump.

Keep that distinction in the station workflow.

The MES can present the active work order and operation, then capture the actual material selection against the output being assembled at whatever tracking depth your process supports.

A scan still needs a clear meaning.

When someone asks which customer needs an order and when it's due, the ERP will often be the place where that business record lives and gets maintained.

Closer to production, there's your Manufacturing Execution System, or MES.

It supports production execution and shop floor records, which can help establish what work has started, what has finished, and what production has reported against an order.

Those responsibilities can overlap in practice.

Some plants record more production detail in their ERP while others rely heavily on an MES, so I'd start by understanding your actual setup rather than assuming a clean split.

Neither system needs to be broken for the planner to struggle.

A business record can correctly describe the customer commitment while a production record correctly describes completed work.

And that's not stop doing anything, but stop.

let's stop adding new shiny objects new technologies new pilots to uh to the um to the ongoing kind of reality of their operations and and and let's take a step back um in in this as well we it would have been really easy for us to just launch a new mes pilot we we partner with uh MES platforms and we would have been paid to implement a new platform and pilot something.

But we really did hold this customer off because starting that MES journey was not really the right first move for them relative to everything else that was on their plate.

I think that's the difference between working with a firm that is really going to diagnose the reality of your situation before just prescribing something and trying to just win the sale.

I think it's important.

So, for instance, we're working right now, we're in pursuit with a global manufacturer, 400 plants.

They operate in over 100 countries.

And they have shared with us on their MES journey that they have 30 plus different plants.

And we are pushing so much that actually we have other systems.

Every plant has its own system, an old SQL database, an old MES, whatever.

You can find everything.

Still, Pi stays the sole industrial data platform.

That is really key.

uh it helps it helped a lot because again if you're looking at three systems an operator is now looking at only at one and he knows he can trust the data and he can take the best decision because he has all the right kpis in front of him based and he doesn't have to think about what what is behind it because this is the data model And that is also something that we've learned over the past three years, and that we are proud to see being part of the adoption phase, if you will.

Then the other interesting thing I see is that when I look at, let's say, an HMI SCADA project or generally an MES project, there is a...

If I think of the old as-is process and the new to-be processes, you design, you deploy the to-be processes, and you're kind of done.

Super exciting.

And so the funny part is, while DG does do a lot of data center work, I'm actually an MES engineer.

So the second I saw a data center, I was like, oh, no.

I am not maybe the most qualified for this.