I. Technical Architecture
While most users don't concern themselves with the technical architecture of a MES design, a good MES product must first and foremost possess advanced technical support (such as SOA architecture). Only an advanced development platform coupled with configurable modular components can quickly build business functions tailored to different user scenarios. Imagine this: in manufacturing management, everyone has different business visions and management styles. Without a robust platform backbone and with unlimited stacking of customized modules, even the best system will collapse and crash. This is why industrial software products from Siemens, Dassault Systèmes, and others mostly adopt SOA architecture. Based on this, and combined with MVVM coding rules, millions of different business functions can often be built using hundreds or thousands of flexible, loosely coupled basic modules, making it easier to satisfy diverse needs. Therefore, for customers with high requirements, especially those aiming for intelligent manufacturing , it is necessary to understand the underlying technologies supporting the product before selecting an MES product.
II. Basic Functions
In terms of functional coverage, a comprehensive MES system should possess five basic modules: product and process management, production planning and scheduling management, material logistics management, production quality management, and workshop equipment maintenance management. It should also include modules for production resource management. For intelligent manufacturing MES systems, system integration and equipment interface modules (discussed separately) are also essential; otherwise, it cannot achieve information exchange within the workshop and support the intelligent scheduling, optimization, and visualization functions required for intelligent workshops. These are also explicitly required by the upcoming national standards "General Technical Requirements for Digital Workshops" and "General Technical Requirements for Intelligent Factories." Therefore, an MES system conforming to intelligent workshop requirements must possess the above-mentioned basic functions.
III. Platformization
MES products on the market are mainly divided into two types: project-level and customized products based on customer needs, and general platform products. Project-level MES has the advantages of personalization, strong applicability, low cost, and fast delivery, but it also has the disadvantages of lacking industry-wide general rules in the development requirements description, which can easily lead to the system not conforming to changing business needs and industry rules. If the enterprise has new requirements in the future, it will need to invest a lot of secondary development, and at the same time, it will also pose a severe test to the stability of the software architecture.
Platform-based MES products require developers to have a deep understanding and familiarity with the actual manufacturing processes of the industry, even including in-depth knowledge of key production procedures and technologies, rather than simply designing the MES from a program development perspective. Simultaneously, developers need to plan and build products according to standards such as ISA95 to facilitate business integration and data sharing with other standardized software. Excellent and experienced platform-based MES companies should first and foremost be industry experts, capable of freely configuring the system based on the industry's production characteristics using modular and pluggable technologies. This allows factories to quickly implement an MES system that conforms to industry commonalities while meeting the specific needs of the enterprise. Therefore, when conditions permit, it is recommended to choose a product-level platform-based MES with excellent scalability. Although the initial investment in capital and manpower is larger, such products offer better stability, lower deployment risk, and a longer application cycle.
IV. Ease of Operation
With the rapid development of IT technology, new visual experiences and operational methods are profoundly influencing users' application habits. Especially for software products based on actual factory applications, since users are at the workshop level, they must possess characteristics of ease of learning, ease of use, and quick onboarding. This includes: using clear and intuitive interface icons; using a workflow engine to drive rapid application operation; and ensuring that, in actual application, every operator, whether experienced or novice, can quickly access their application interface, find the required function menus, and clearly understand the entire business process related to them. Furthermore, it should allow for extensive use of drag-and-drop, linking, and other operation modes similar to Win7 and Win10 to achieve quick and convenient operations such as combining, splitting, zooming, shrinking, and hiding. Of course, ease of use also includes an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly, and practical interface.
V. Warehouse Management Functions
Some MES products, especially foreign MES systems, have weak warehouse management capabilities, often only controlling materials while leaving the warehouse to ERP or WMS. Driven by the demand for smart manufacturing in recent years, the requirements for flexibility, dynamism, and real-time processing in production processes have increased significantly. If MES only manages materials within the workshop, it can no longer meet actual needs. Therefore, new MES systems will inevitably extend to the warehouse level to gain more control and scheduling authority, transforming the non-real-time warehouse of ERP into a real-time, dynamic warehouse of MES, and achieving two-way data synchronization.
VI. Digital Production Scheduling
As planning, scheduling, and production management personnel, the primary concern is how to deliver production orders on time and quickly. This requires MES (Manufacturing Execution System) to not only connect to the MRP (Material Requirements Planning) calculations of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) with unlimited scheduling capabilities, but also to implement APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling). While this is the ideal outcome, in practical applications, especially for multi-variety, small-batch production lines, truly fully automated scheduling is rare. Therefore, we believe that a new type of MES needs to dynamically collect and analyze data on equipment status (including pre-diagnosis), process changes, and personnel conditions, and needs to be supported by big data analysis and optimization functions in a production scheduling simulation system to achieve the ideal of automated scheduling. However, before the system reaches this goal, or as a supplement, manual scheduling will be more practical. This requires the MES to have functions for quick scheduling and order insertion that are easy for manual operation, and to present information such as online work order execution status, material availability, equipment and fixture occupancy, and predicted completion cycles in real-time for reference during scheduling, along with auxiliary functions such as early warning and error reporting. This is referred to as "digital scheduling."
VII. Visualization Function
1. Advanced MES products have increasingly rich visualization forms. Dot plots, line plots, pie charts, radar charts, Gantt charts, and 3D plots are already the most basic functions. The development trend of new MES is to have the ability to interface with production process simulation (optimization), logistics, SCADA and other data, display the current production status and prediction in multiple dimensions, and realize data interaction and presentation with mobile terminals.
2. In traditional MES systems, the visualization settings are mostly handled by MES vendors through secondary development, or by the company's IT personnel developing Crystal Reports and Kanban boards individually based on constantly changing needs. This is far from meeting the diverse and personalized visualization management requirements of modern smart manufacturing factories. The visualization functions of the new generation of MES systems can be quickly set up and configured by users directly according to current production needs, and the operation is flexible and convenient.
VIII. System Integration Capabilities
This is the most intelligent feature of the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) in a smart factory:
1. Integration with information systems: As an MES system for intelligent manufacturing , system integration capability should be an important consideration. This includes integration with databases such as SQL and ORCAL, integration with software such as PDM (integrating with BOM and process), ERP (integrating with planning and materials), WMS (integrating with logistics and transportation), and simulation (integrating with data), and integration with iOS and Android mobile terminals, etc.
2. Integration with data formats: This refers to the technical implementation methods for information integration described above, such as XML, CSV, TXT, intermediate tables agreed upon by both parties, Web services, open API interfaces, etc.
IX. Device Interface Capabilities
In recent years, the Industrial Internet, Industrial Internet of Things, and Industrial Big Data have gradually transitioned from concepts to practical applications. A core aspect of this is the need for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to interface with various types of physical devices. These types include devices across seven different physical layers, as shown in the diagram below: instruments, sensors, AGVs, robots, industrial control equipment, CNC equipment, pick-and-place machines, AOI, and so on. A good MES system not only needs to collect data from these devices but also needs to use standardized, universal formats.
Integration of various industrial buses (such as OPCUA), with device communication protocols such as Profibus, Profinet, Modbus, CC-Link, DF1, SNP, device-specific APIs, and custom protocols. Some also directly interface with device data formats such as JSON, XML, CSV, and TXT.
This paper briefly outlines some characteristic requirements of the next-generation MES based on intelligent manufacturing from several perspectives. Of course, this is not exhaustive, as it also involves industry-specific functions such as material and process analysis, diagnosis, and optimization. This article aims to provide a starting point for further discussion on the development and application of new MES technologies.
