Manufacturing execution system

The question is whether that map can become something more useful between workshops.

Can it regenerate itself from the events already happening in your ERP, MES, quality systems, maintenance records, and shop floor data? I'm not talking about another blinking screen full of machine tags.

Nobody needs another screen full of machine tags.

I mean a governed model of the value stream, one that can show how a defined product family is moving right now, where it's waiting, what evidence supports that view, and where the data still leaves gaps.

ERP creates the sales order, generates a work order, checks material planning, and provides the routing that says which operations should happen in what broad sequence.

That's the business view.

Down on the shop floor, the manufacturing execution system, your MES, dispatches work, records operator confirmations, and tracks completion at each process step.

Depending on how the plant runs, it might also hold serial or batch genealogy.

Your ERP still sees capacity that doesn't exist.

The MES might show an interrupted operation.

A supervisor might already be moving people around.

Meanwhile, the customer promise sits on the order like nothing happened.

The PLC or the IoT layer connected to it can report that the machine entered a fault state with a code, a timestamp, and whether the cycle stopped.

That's useful because it comes close to the equipment and arrives quickly.

The MES adds the production meaning.

It tells you whether the machine was running an active work order, whether the operation had started, whether units are complete, and whether the resource was already waiting for material or quality release.

Identifiers.

The sales order number, work order number, operation number, batch number, and material lot reference need to connect across ERP, MES, quality maintenance, and the scheduling layer.

They don't all need to use the same native number, but the relationships must be clear and stable.

If the MES records an operation against one identifier while the scheduler expects another, real-time visibility turns into a debate about which row belongs to which job.

No optimizer can repair an identity problem after the fact.

Orders define the demand and the commitment.

The same pattern shows up with quality holds during production.

A part finishes machining, but inspection puts the batch on hold because a measurement needs review or a nonconformance needs a disposition.

Okay, what are they?

We have AI and analytics, cloud and IoT, that's the Internet of Things, digital twin, automation, and MES, and finally something called digital pharma GPT.

This is how we move from the philosophical roadblocks to the actual tangible solution.

Right, and here's where it gets really interesting because I want to push back on a few of these.

Suddenly, your data silos collapse into a single unified dashboard.

That makes a lot of sense.

Now, what about automation and MES? MES stands for Manufacturing Execution Systems, right?

Correct.

All they could do was wait.

That's the kind of weekend it was when Honeywell upgraded the manufacturing execution system with no shop floor disruptions.

Today, we're breaking that down, how Honeywell Aerospace and Razor Leaf teamed up to pull off exactly that with Honeywell's Solumina MES upgrade.

by setting up a parallel infrastructure strategy that turned a power outage into a non-event, and a rollback strategy that should be part of anyone's migration plan.

Let's jump in.

Yes.

Let's talk about what we're talking about today.

We are going to have a conversation about Honeywell's recent journey when they upgraded its Lumina MES system, which stands for Manufacturing Execution System.

Greg has been around this space for 30-plus years, and if he sounds familiar, it might be because he has been a guest on the pod previously.

What's new this time is that he has a co-guest, and that is Alan Hinchman, who is Chief Revenue Officer of Grey Matter, where he oversees a client engagement team that helps companies in manufacturing, energy, water treatment, and other industries build solutions powered by Grey Matter's major offerings, automation and control, brilliant operations MES, and factory transformation, each of which is built on a foundation of industrial cybersecurity.

Before joining Grey Matter in 2015, he served as the chief operating officer of the Water Initiative, a team of global business executives and renowned scientists who develop water systems to fit local conditions.

Prior to that, Alan was the global market director for water and wastewater industries at GE Digital, now Valotic.

And so we continue to add kinda new capabilities, new expertise to it.

Um, historically, we had some products that were very complementary to, you know, SCADA HMI platforms, and they filled really obvious holes in terms of some key areas around, you know, uh, you know, industrial reporting and, and those types of things and, and alarm notification and alarm management.

Um, with some of the new, uh, acquisitions that we've made, uh, they're a lot more-- they fit better, and they're, uh, you know, built for purpose around the discrete sector, in particular food and beverage and life sciences and, and they play a lot, uh, better with MES applications and, and other plant applications that aren't necessarily as SCADA or HMI-focused.

And, and, you know, we're really, you know, happy with the, uh, what, what's, what's been a really interesting dialogue as we've worked with Alan and his team is to understand how does this fit, where does it fit, what challenges does it solve for customers, and how does it ultimately make that better? And, you know, as you-- one of the great things about a trusted partnership is you can go to them and you can, you can have these dialogues and they can tell you, "Hey, this doesn't make sense in this area.

So for instance, we talked about this place where, you know, these examples where you can do dynamic recipe management.

If you have different recipe management systems, whether they sit inside of your MES or they sit somewhere else, if all of them are different, that becomes super, super hard to manage.

If every factory can make their own decision on every layer of the architecture, then managing it becomes super tricky.

And I think we've seen that in other places.

That used to be a purely mechanical system.

Then we started with supervisory software on top of that that gave us what we would call automation today, which is a software-defined hardware layer.

We then have your SCADA systems or MES systems that are pure software that have come on top of it and given even more flexibility and control.

And now we're building next generation analytics and AI on top of that.

ERP typically owns demand, work orders, planned dates, purchasing signals, and most of the material record.

MES owns execution status, labor reporting, actual quantities, and traceability.

Maintenance handles planned downtime and asset condition, quality controls inspection status and release rules, and engineering owns routes, standards, process changes, and the technical conditions that decide whether an alternate resource can run a part.

Nobody should assume one team can keep all of this correct alone.

That optimism shows up later as a missed delivery.

So this is where shop floor actuals earn their place in scheduling.

A manufacturing execution system, or MES, can record actual starts, finishes, quantities, scrap, downtime reasons, and labor activity depending on how the plant runs.

That information shouldn't just feed a report at month-end.