Aug 7, 2019
About the Customer
Engineering’s Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) team recently delivered another successful implementation milestone for a global Agriculture and Chemical Manufacturing giant’s enterprise-level digital transformation initiative. For several years, our Industries eXcellence group has been working with the customer’s $14B+ multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology division. This division is split into 2 main manufacturing areas – Chemical/Crop Protection and Seed/Row Crop (Corn, Soy, Cotton). Ultimately, the products manufactured by both of the customer’s business units aim to help farmers protect their crops, improve yield performance and increase profitability.
A Global MES Program
Having won a competitive bid against some of the Big Five consulting firms, Engineering was chosen as the customer’s strategic partner for an advanced Digital Manufacturing program aimed at standardizing their Manufacturing Execution Systems and processes across more than 70 production sites worldwide. For the last 5 years, our team has been guiding and supporting the customer at every step of this ambitious program.
In addition to providing consulting and project management services to support the initiative, from a technical standpoint, our main undertaking involved the design, development, validation and implementation of an effective and reusable Manufacturing Execution System (MES) template which could be applied globally to all plants as well as to each of the 2 lines of the customer’s manufacturing business.
MES Template Design & Development
Not only did the customer want to leverage the new global MES template to standardize their manufacturing operations across all sites worldwide, but they also wanted a system that was customized to meet the specific needs of their processes. The new MES would replace a legacy system that was mainly focused on production reporting. The most critical capabilities our team was tasked to include in the development of the final template included:
- Order management
- Monitoring of order execution
- Integration with Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS)
- OEE, KPIs and performance monitoring
- Packaging management
- Inventory management
- MES feeding Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Leveraging Siemens’ Opcenter Execution Process (formerly known as Opcenter Execution (SIMATIC IT) UAPI) software, continuous stakeholder feedback, as well as our unique agile methodology and a world-class team of solution architects and developers, Engineering delivered 2 flexible and powerful global MES templates for each of the customer’s manufacturing lines of business.
System Implementation & Go-Live
Following the delivery of the MES template, Engineering was also the system integrator chosen to lead the roll-out phase of this initiative, supporting configuration and deployment execution at Chemical/Crop Protection and Seed/Row Crop production sites worldwide. Just recently, our team delivered the latest implementation milestone for one of the customer’s most challenging Crop Protection sites in the U.S. The plant’s chemical manufacturing process was extremely high-risk, very complex and involving an enormous number of variables that had to be managed by the new MES system.
Because every plant has slightly different priorities, the global template was configured to provide the most important functionality for this specific site –digitalization of production order execution. We are proud to say that the MES is now fully up and running at this facility. Eliminating the inconsistencies and errors that are a natural byproduct of manual processes, the MES now manages all steps automatically and provides continuous feedback to production operators and managers. Integration with ERP ensures inventory reconciliation. In the months to come, our team will continue to train end users and support this facility to ensure full functionality and adoption in the delicate hyper-care period following go-live.
Engineering’s Advantage
While it is difficult to pinpoint a single deciding element given the overarching scope of this initiative, we believe that the delivery of a reusable template has been our greatest contribution to the customer’s digital transformation program. Engineering’s Industries eXcellence team has built a scalable solution that can be applied globally across both lines of the customer’s business and yet one flexible enough to be adaptable to each plant’s specific processes and needs.
At the most basic level, the template has facilitated the implementation of a standardized and effective MES solution at all the of the customer’s production sites:
- Performance reports can be easily compared between plants to identify strengths and weaknesses;
- Day-to-day tasks of operators have been simplified and optimized;
- Integration between MES and ERP ensures communication between all levels of the organization;
- Real-time reporting enables managers to monitor, identify and minimize issues with quality and performance;
- Manufacturing processes have been automated, synchronized, integrated and standardized both within each plant and across the entire global enterprise.
The customer now has a global MES template that they can evolve and adapt to their future plants. As their strategic partner, our team will continue to work with the customer’s team to add enhancements, developments and functionalities if needed, but we believe that the emblem of an effective IT program is the successful handover of solution governance to the customer.
For that reason, now and throughout this project, our team has provided extensive documentation, knowledge transfer and end user training to ensure that the customer will be able to take full ownership of their MES solution with confidence at the end of the global program.
With the completion of each milestone, our team has continued to grow as a customer and industry expert. At Engineering Industries eXcellence, we are proud of our unique ability to offer end-to-end technology solutions and services to our customers, an advantage that we believe has set us apart as a niche player in the expanding Industry 4.0 space. Our ability to provide system analysis, design, implementation and support expertise from the shop floor to executive management levels and across all of the customer’s manufacturing processes was critical to unify the different components of this ground-breaking initiative and to drive the customer forward along their incredible digital transformation journey.
