An MES is often introduced to the shop floor to drive performance initiatives. Concepts such as OEE help provide insights that can be leveraged to reduce downtime and improve production output. However, the role of an MES in ensuring product quality may be overlooked. Manufacturers might instead look to isolated LIMS (laboratory information management systems) and/or LES (laboratory execution systems) to track product quality, or leverage more primitive means such as paper and spreadsheets. However, the MES can often be leveraged to fulfill quality-specific use cases in a more straightforward, integrated manner.

 

  • Knowing what to check and when to check it can be tribal knowledge - experienced operators know what to do to ‘fix the mix’ but checks may be overlooked or forgotten, and the results and corrections made are not documented. Expensive scrap or recall events are more likely, and continuous improvement initiatives are hindered as a result. The MES has both schedule and real-time production status visibility, including the product being produced, batch or cycle times, BOM / recipe requirements, and incoming material genealogy. This allows the MES to execute situational sample and test plans, ensuring that product is checked at the right time, the proper specifications are applied, and corrections are tracked, including additional materials added or production operations performed.

  • The MES is the front-line user interface on the shop floor, allowing operators to interact with a single consolidated view, reducing learning curves.

  • The MES can promote seamless electronic communication flows, allowing a lab to see when samples are due to be taken based upon actual production progress, and allowing operators to see testing results and specified corrections directly from their shop-floor screens. This increase in real-time communications can reduce the time taken to perform quality verifications, improving efficiency and leading to increased production output.

  • The MES can provide quality disposition and corrective action information to higher-level systems, such as the ERP, using interface conduits likely already established between the two layers.

  • Modern MES platforms can interface via a variety of conduits, often using low-code toolkits. This allows the MES to be connected directly to shop-floor or lab instrumentation.

  • Both shop-floor and lab quality checks can be driven by one engine, and the resulting data brought into one consistent data store, facilitating ease of data review, analytics, and other reporting aspects.

  • The ability to leverage a single software stack for both production and quality can reduce overall licensing costs, infrastructure requirements, and maintenance costs.

  • The MES is typically an enterprise application, allowing global specifications and sample plans to be configured that can be applied across all production facilities in a consistent manner. Historically, plants capture this information via a variety of means, such as PDF documents, Excel sheets, legacy systems, etc.  This information may be out-of-date or inconsistent across the facilities. The MES allows this master data to be consistently configured and applied. While ERP systems can also be leveraged to define quality master data, the ERP layer may not have the granularity or flexibility to maintain nuanced sample plans required for complex manufacturing processes found in modern production facilities.

Quality is an often overlooked but extremely powerful component of a comprehensive MES rollout. When starting an MES journey or looking at where to go next, be sure that the voices of individuals responsible for quality are heard and strongly consider building sample and test functionality into your MES deployment roadmap.