What is the MES system? What are the main functions of the MES system?

 Manufacturing companies are concerned about three questions: what to produce? How much to produce? How to produce? The company's production plan answers the first two questions. "How to produce" is controlled by the process control system SFC at the production site. ERP, CRM, and other systems only provide data and information for the preparation of production plans.

In order to make the "plan" reach the "production" link, how to quickly reflect the changing factors in the production process to the "plan", it is necessary to establish a "real-time information channel" between the plan and the production, the manufacturing execution system (MES) is the plan "Information hub" between production and production.

 

The benefits of implementing the MES system

MES eliminates the information "fault" between enterprise planning and production control, enabling enterprises to "react in real-time."

 With the continuous deepening of enterprise information construction, ERP, SCM, CRM, EIP, PDM, and other information management software have gradually been accepted by many managers and have begun to be widely used in enterprise management. Certain management benefits. Therefore, some people think that the production and operation activities of ERP enterprises can be "held in the palm of the hand, at the micro-level."

 In fact, there is another important link that has been overlooked: the above-mentioned management system mainly processes and calculates the management data of the enterprise, and is mainly used for planning, forecasting, analysis, and other aspects without involving it. Experts pointed out that "especially in manufacturing companies, the information flow disruption in the process of management informationization is more obvious. The management of the production site by the company is like operating in a black box, which makes many management benefits almost discounted."

 

Information "gap" between planning and control

The traditional production technology adopted by my country's manufacturing industry for many years is to produce "from top to bottom" as planned. Simply put, it is from the planning level to the production control level: the company makes a production plan based on orders or shopping malls, and the production plan arrives at the production site to organize the delivery of the produced products. The focus of enterprise management informatization is mainly concentrated on the planning layer of production plan management and general transaction processing. For example, ERP is "positioned" at the upper level of the company's plan, integrating the company's existing production resources, and formulating production plans.

 

However, in the current enterprise, the information transfer between the production plan derived from ERP and the production site relies on "manual operation", that is, the information of the production site is manually inputting to the upper system. Therefore, there is a fault in the information flow between the planning layer and the process control layer at the production site. The changes in the market environment and the continuous updating of modern production management concepts have increasingly urgent requirements for "elimination", that is, informatization. The management system can grasp the status of the production site in real time from bottom to top. 

It is embodied in the following aspects:

 

1. Order production requirements

 

Modern consumers are no longer satisfied with mass production. Automobiles, home appliances, mobile phones, and computers have all set off a wave of "personalization". In order to satisfy these market demands, the production model of the manufacturing industry has gradually shifted from stock-oriented production (BTS) to non-order-oriented production (BTO). BTO brings personalization and faster response speed to people who need products or services. For product or service providers, to complete these two points, not only need to have faster planning tools, conversion from mass production to small batch production, and e-commerce, but more importantly, it is necessary to ensure that production is planned from order to production. A series of links such as control delivery, there is smooth information, communication and response between the producer and the customer. As far as the status quo of my country's manufacturing industry is concerned, the problem of information exchange between production plans and production is widespread.

 

2. Requirements for improving product quality

 The simple proportional relationship between cost and quality has long been denied by modern management theory, but it is not easy to achieve a win-win situation between cost and quality. According to the total quality management (TQM) thinking, to improve product quality without increasing production costs, it is necessary to strictly control the entire production process and various factors affecting production.

 For example, product defect rate is an important factor reflecting product quality. Its occurrence may be caused by one point on the production line, or it may be caused by several error points. If the effective monitoring and information management of each point on the production line is not carried out, it will affect the product quality, and due to the high degree of automation of the production line, one error may affect a batch of products instead of one.

 

3. Real-time information processing

 ERP can quickly and efficiently arrange production plans based on orders, but it cannot obtain, analyze, and process various products and production-related information on the production site in real time. For example, some parts may be out of stock, causing the factory to stop production due to lack of materials, but managers cannot obtain this information from the ERP system in a timely manner, resulting in delays in decision-making, affecting production progress and even delivery time.

 

4. Demand caused by the recall system

A direct problem brought by the recall system is that when a recall occurs, the manufacturer needs to call out various information in the product manufacturing process from the system, such as: operation information of each process, operator, and supplier information of parts.

 This cannot be used for planning-level ERP and other systems, or on-site process control systems.

 Plan implementation, MES connects the past and the future.

How to eliminate the gap between the planning layer and the on-site control layer? 

MES system enters people's field of vision. MES (Manufacturing Execution System, Manufacturing Execution System) is a new concept proposed by the American management community in the 1990s. It is between the planning layer and the on-site operation control layer, and is mainly responsible for production management and scheduling execution. MES improves the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry by controlling all factory resources (including materials, equipment, personnel, process instructions, and facilities), and provides a method for systematically integrating quality control, document management, and production scheduling on a unified platform.

MES emphasizes control and coordination, so that modern manufacturing information systems not only have a good planning system, but also an execution system that enables the plan to be implemented. However, in the 1990s, companies under the inventory-oriented production model generally did not receive much attention.

In recent years, with the introduction of new production models such as Just-In-Time and Order-Oriented Production (BTO), as well as product quality and non-high demand raised by customers and the market, MES has been re-discovered and valued. At the same time, after the Internet economic bubble burst, companies began to realize that they must enhance their competitiveness from the most basic production management, that is, only obtain data and information from the product level (basic automation level), and achieve continuous information at the management level through the operational control level. Streaming to achieve enterprise information integration can make the enterprise invincible in the increasingly fierce competition. At present, MES has been rapidly and widely used abroad.

 An enterprise information system is a collection of interpenetrating information. As the most important and basic activity in manufacturing production, relevant information especially needs real-time processing and analysis. Specifically, it collects a large amount of real-time data during the production process, handles real-time events in time, and maintains the two-way communication capability with the planning layer and the production control layer, receives corresponding data from the upper and lower layers, and feeds back processing results and production instructions.

 From the perspective of enterprise informatization framework, MES functions between the upper-level information management system (such as ERP, CRM) and the on-site control system (workshop control).

 Functionally, MES should fulfill the purpose of production management and coordination, including the following primary modules: order management, mission scheduling, material management, work-in-process monitoring, production scheduling, quality management, equipment management, capacity balance analysis, system integration (integration ERP, SFC, etc.) etc.