You need to push production to get more out of your existing assets. To do this, you’ve tried to optimize your current process of collecting data manually and putting it into spreadsheets for analysis, but this continues to be error prone and time consuming. Not to mention, you’re constantly looking at outdated data. As a result, you’ve maybe dabbled in ways to digitize data collection or have deployed some of the latest IIoT technology in your production process with little-to-no success.
Yet, you know that without a successful digital transformation strategy, your company will be left behind and not able to compete. To address this, you realize you will need a strategy that leverages best practices and proven solutions to deliver significant improvement to performance, efficiency, planning, quality, inventory management, and maintenance. But you’ve hit a roadblock trying to quantify and succinctly communicate the risks and costs associated with using your old disparate data systems and manual data collection methods, and how an MES can address these issues.
If this narrative sounds familiar, we can help. In this first part of our four-part series on best practices for a successful MES strategy, we will help you connect the dots between the business challenges you’re facing and how a properly designed MES can address your issues.
Identifying and Understanding the Business Problems an MES Can Solve
In short, many manufacturers’ problems can be attributed to having a lack of information because too much paper is being used across the plant floor. But it can be tough to eliminate paper and shift away from manual data collection processes. To change the status quo and secure the required resources, you need to present a clear picture of the business needs. Below is an overview of the common business drivers for adopting digital technologies in your plant and a reference to which MES tools can bring you the change required.
Lack of Accurate and Real-Time Visibility into Operations
Your Challenge: Due to today’s labor shortages, you’re likely running operations with a skeleton crew. This makes it impossible for operators to dedicate enough time to performing manual data collection and data entry into data analysis software or an Excel spreadsheet so that it is usable. Even if your operators can find the time, manual data is error prone and not delivered in real time, which means you’re constantly analyzing old, and possibly inaccurate, data.
Our Solution: This is the heart of what all our MES solutions offer.
Lack of Real-Time Information to Drive Production Improvements
Your Challenge: You know you’re not maximizing production capacity, but you don’t have a clear understanding of where production bottlenecks are happening and why. You also don’t have a way to quickly determine the root cause of your downtime and are struggling with determining how to decrease it.
Our Solution: Performance Management
Lack of a Real-Time Schedule Connected to Your ERP
Your Challenge: You print your daily production schedule every morning from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and hand it to your operators. This is problematic because paper schedules are ridged – you can’t optimize production scheduling to minimize time spent on changeovers or account for other unexpected changes. These issues are often compounded after the first shift when your master scheduler is gone for the day.
Our Solution: Production Management
Lack of an Automated Real-Time Workflow for the Entire Plant
Your Challenge: You’re using paper to outline your workflow diagrams, which is leading to a lack of visibility and operators running outdated workflows and generally being out of the loop.
Our Solution: Visual Workflow
Lack of Traceability
Your Challenge: You can’t easily identify which raw materials are being used in each batch, what stage of the production process products are in, and where your finished products are going. While this is an issue for any manufacturer, it is extremely problematic when those working in heavily regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals and food and beverage, can’t easily produce this data.
Our Solution: Traceability
Lack of an Integrated Maintenance System
Your Challenge: You’re experiencing a lot of downtime, and costs, due to maintenance issues, and your equipment is wearing out faster than it should. You have a standalone maintenance system that connects to an archaic database of your equipment, and it can’t provide any insight into how long your equipment has been running or how much downtime it has had in the past.
Our Solution: Maintenance Management
Lack of Strategy and Best Practices for Implementation
Your Challenge: You may have already taken steps to mitigate manual data collection and remove paper from your plant floor, but now you have too much uncontextualized data and you don’t know what to do with it.
Our Solution: Talk to our experts
Reviewing these common business drivers and pinpointing which of these challenges you’re facing is an excellent first step to formalizing your digital transformation needs and developing a successful MES strategy. In part two of this series, we will discuss industry best practices for gaining internal alignment on the changes needed as well as how to create a project roadmap for agile implementation and how to develop the technology stack that will best meet your needs. In the meantime, learn more about our MES offerings or contact us if you have any questions.
