Nov 29, 2019
About the Customer
The customer is an American company and a globally-recognized manufacturer of light and heavy equipment for both consumer and commercial use. While we have supported a few different Digital Manufacturing projects for the customer in the past, our team recently delivered a comprehensive Manufacturing Execution System (MES) global template requirements map to support the organization’s ongoing digital transformation effort.
The Customer’s Need
This year, as another step along their ambitious Industry 4.0 program, the customer took on a challenging digitalization initiative focused on their global manufacturing operations. This initiative aims to standardize the MES solutions deployed across all of their plants by leveraging the Rockwell FactoryTalk ProductionCentre MES and sedApta Software Suite Sales & Operations Planning offerings. In partnering with Engineering, the customer’s ultimate goal was to acquire the tools and roadmap they needed to roll out a new standardized MES and replace the plethora of home-grown, paper-based and/or non-existent solutions across their factories worldwide.
About the Project
Our Industries eXcellence team was brought in to deliver a single standardized MES global template map that could be used to roll out the new MES to all of the customer's production sites both in the U.S. and abroad. Engineering’s global specialists first led and executed an in-depth solution requirements assessment covering production planning and scheduling, production management, quality management and performance management. The requirements gathering process was a global effort, done onsite by our experts and focused on 3 of the customer’s most important production facilities in Italy and the United States.
Numerous workshops with customer stakeholders exposed their greatest pain points, enabled priorities and expectations to be defined, and gave our team the business and manufacturing process knowledge we needed to understand both the core capabilities and configuration flexibilities that had to be present in the final template. The most important functionalities for the customer’s new MES emerged as well: traceability of raw material, traceability of produced products, defect and scrap management, and scheduling of orders. Our MES specialists then took that information and created requirements at both the site-specific and global levels. The process was quite complex as our experts had to normalize between all 3 sites in scope, identifying what was specific to each site and/or production type and what was similar globally.
Engineering’s Advantage
At the end of this assessment, Engineering delivered a comprehensive template map that detailed all the requirements – both functional and technical – for a global Manufacturing Execution System (MES) deployment plus site-specific differentiators. The use cases documented by our world-class MES team numbered in the hundreds in the end. The customer can now confidently move forward in the development and implementation of their new system, knowing that every need and requirement can be met from both the business and operational standpoints.
Although there is an upfront investment period for analysis and development of a template, this investment is minimal in comparison to the long-term benefits for a multi-site rollout. The template approach allows companies to invest once in the design and development of their standardized manufacturing environment. The result of this strategy is a significantly more efficient, less costly and more effectively adopted environment for the enterprise rollout of a manufacturing IT solution. For companies with multi-site production facilities, Engineering continues to offer a template-based rollout approach that has been proven to generate a lot of success for some of our biggest global customers.
