The Bee Hive

Achieving true integration between factory floor and business systems entails a good deal of creative thinking and "what-if" type analysis of your plant's workflow.

As you evaluate the way your business operates and how different solutions might enable you to increase yout throughput and efficiency, don't neglect the key role played by scheduling. For most manufacturers, the ever-changing nature of their markets requires a means of flexibility and quickly changing the scheduling of the work. I like to use an automotive metaphor to decsribe the relationship between scheduling the work and what happens on the shop floor. I think of manufacturing execution systems (MES) as being like a speedometer in your car. It tells you how fast you are going, but it doesn't give you any mechanism to influence that speed. For that, youo need the accelerator and the brake. I find it strange that a lot of people invest in MES first, so they get the speedometer and know how fast they're going, but they haven't any mechanism to change speeds. MES gives a company analysis of what's happened in the past, but often lacks the ability to use that information to influence the future. Some scheduling programs are future (prediction) devices, not historical analysis devices. You can argue that MES is very much an historical analysis device, and that's a fundamental difference between the two. If you are going to use MES to control the process, how did the process know what it was supposed to do in the first place? I see scheduling solutions as closing the loop. The scheduling takes the output from ERP and produces a finite-capacity schedule, which is then used to drive the shop floor. Under those circumstances, the feedback you receive from the MES, which tells you where the schedule has been adhered to and where it hasn't, becomes a useful piece of data.