Manufacturing Execution System (MES)

MES software, short for manufacturing execution system software, runs and records production on the shop floor: which order runs on which machine, what each machine and operator produced, why a machine stopped and what was scrapped. MSF MES does this in real time from machine data and operator panels, calculates OEE and TEEP, and exchanges work orders and confirmations with the ERP.

MES manages and monitors shop-floor operations in real time, while ERP handles broader business functions like finance and orders. MSF MES integrates with your existing ERP so both stay in sync.

No. SCADA controls and visualises process state in real time at the control level, and the MES works one level above it, in minutes and hours: which order is running, on which machine, from which material, by whom and at what quality. The two are not substitutes. MSF MES can collect machine data through an existing SCADA or OPC server, so the SCADA stays in place.

No. META Smart I/O devices and sensor kits connect machines of any age. Even fully manual workstations can be digitalized with touch panels.

Basic MES goes live in a few weeks; a full Advanced rollout typically takes a couple of months depending on the number of workstations.

No, a collection-only deployment is normal, but ask how it is enforced rather than take the promise. Read-only in practice means no write items configured in the collector, a tag or DB list agreed with whoever maintains the programme, PUT/GET or the brand's equivalent restricted on the controller, and the PLC on its own VLAN with the collector talking outbound over TLS. Anything that writes back to a machine, such as recipe download, a setpoint push on changeover or an andon output, is a separate connection to scope deliberately.

The honest half of it. With operators reporting on the panel you get order status, labour booking and operation-level genealogy, but stop durations and cycle times are whatever someone typed, so short stops vanish and availability is an estimate. Where a controller exposes alarm or fault codes, those can be mapped to stop reasons; without a connection every reason is typed by hand. The order model does not change when you connect, but machine-derived stop and cycle data starts then, so numbers either side are not comparable.

Routings have to describe what the floor actually runs, work centres have to be modelled at the granularity you want to measure, and materials need one spelling each. The MES does not create master data problems, it makes them visible in the first week and then gets blamed for them. Measure one real run and one real changeover before go-live and budget for rewriting routings.

Events are stamped with one clock and attributed to the shift they occurred in, so an order running across a boundary splits by time rather than being credited to whoever closed it. Setup and adjustment stays inside planned production time and costs you availability, as the six big losses intend. Excluding changeover is the commonest way an OEE number gets cooked, so agree the time base in writing first.

Login, order start and order finish are a few seconds each; the time that matters goes into stop classification and scrap causes, and that is the step operators drop first. How much it adds up to depends on how many confirmation steps you design in, which is why we time them with you rather than quote a number. Time the sequence yourself during a real changeover, with the operator who will perform it, before you agree the screen layout.

No, and no MES should. Guard interlocks, light curtains and two-hand controls belong in a hardwired circuit or a safety controller assessed under ISO 13849-1 or IEC 62061, where response time and failure behaviour are part of the assessment; no network latency argument changes that. What an MES enforces is procedural: it refuses to open the next operation, holds a lot, or blocks a confirmation. Treat those as quality gates, never as protection for a person.

You can export the raw event stream (machine state changes, order and quantity confirmations, stop and scrap records) as well as rendered reports, and the REST API is where plants build the unusual parts of their own process without waiting for us. Whether that arrives as paged API calls or a bulk file, and how far back the history reaches, depends on your retention and volume, so get the export scope written into the contract. Ask every vendor this, and ask to see the export run on their data.