Dec 1, 2019
About the Customer
Engineering Industries eXcellence’s team is working with an American Aerospace & Defense manufacturing and technology leader. The customer is a global producer of military aircraft and a premier provider of innovative defense systems and solutions for applications that range from undersea to outer space and into cyberspace.
A Strategic Partnership for Industry 4.0
Engineering Industries eXcellence has been working with the customer for many years, chosen as the customer’s strategic partner and system integrator for Digital Manufacturing. In our first initiative together, our Industries eXcellence team led an assessment of the customer’s entire manufacturing business and IT ecosystem, defining and delivering a unique solution maturity model, timeline and roadmap that aligned with the customer’s desired Industry 4.0 vision. Now, we continue to guide them on their digitalization journey, providing expert consulting and supporting the execution of their solution roadmap across different divisions and sites.
The Customer’s Challenge
In the latest initiative, our consulting team is working with the division of the customer’s business that is responsible for the design and manufacture of highly advanced defense equipment and software systems for the U.S. government, including radar and space technology. For this project, our team is leading a comprehensive Manufacturing Software Vendor Selection effort to help the customer select a new Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution to be implemented across their entire division.
Currently, the customer’s plants have a wide range of MES solutions in place – a combination of off-the-shelf products and homegrown custom solutions. Some production areas remain paper-based and do not have any MES in place. There is no system uniformity between sites and even within sites. So, why does the customer want to replace their existing solutions supporting manufacturing execution on the factory floor? Simple: they want system efficiency, standardization and cohesion within and across their division’s many production facilities. Known as an innovator and a visionary in industry throughout the history of their organization, our customer’s commitment to transformation and continuous improvement should come as no surprise.
About the Project
To keep the MES vendor selection process agile, our work has been focused on one of the customer’s major production sites in scope, but with representatives from other sites present and involved for important activities and meetings. Because of the complexity and multitude of MES solutions in place, the customer needed a high level of expertise and assistance in gathering requirements on their various manufacturing processes, as well as help understanding how well they match up with the different vendors and off-the-shelf MES offerings available on the market. Our joint MES and business analyst team was brought in to support the execution of this requirements gathering process. Now, we are managing all communication with vendors to match the customer’s requirements with features and capabilities of their MES products.
Once all have been received, our team will review, grade and report vendor responses with a gap analysis, highlighting which of the requirements can be covered by each off-the-shelf solution, as well as those which would require customization for the requirement to be met. After the responses have been evaluated, several vendors selected by our customer will be invited to the project site to perform a product demo based on use cases we provide. As the customer’s technical expert for MES, our team will be on site for each demo, driving the conversation and asking the critical questions needed to identify key strengths in and gaps of each solution.
Engineering’s Expertise
Our vendor-neutral approach combined with our real-world experience implementing different manufacturing IT solutions means that we can provide the insight needed to help our customer understand the true capabilities of each vendor’s proposed solution and therefore choose the one that best meets the needs of their business. Early next year, our team will generate and deliver a report with feedback from all MES vendors and provide a final assessment based on the entire process. The customer will then take that report and make the final decision about which MES solution they want to deploy across their manufacturing division. As always, Engineering Industries eXcellence will continue to provide guidance, services and support in any capacity the customer may need as they move forward with this exciting Digital Manufacturing initiative.
