What is MES? A comprehensive guide to manufacturing execution systems

A manufacturing execution system (MES) is like the brain behind your manufacturing operations. As the market – and the world – get more complex, MES gives you the real-time visibility and control you need to manage and optimise a dynamic manufacturing ecosystem. From analysing Internet of Things (IoT) data to finding and flagging potential work-stopping disruptions, today’s best MES solutions use AI, advanced analytics, and user-friendly dashboards to help you unify your manufacturing operations on a single platform. 

A manufacturing execution system (MES) is software that monitors, synchronises, and controls physical production processes in plants and factories. It provides real-time visibility into shop floor operations, ensuring that production stays on track from start to finish. 

The primary purpose of an MES is to manage the transformation of raw materials into intermediate or finished goods – but it does much more than that. An MES acts as a vital link between business planning systems like ERP and the shop floor, coordinating workflows, tracking materials, and enforcing quality standards. By capturing and analysing live production data, it helps manufacturers boost efficiency, reduce waste, and maintain compliance with industry regulations.

An MES plays a critical role in optimising production, ensuring quality, and improving operational efficiency by collecting and analysing real-time data from the shop floor. Below are some of its core functions:

• Production and inventory management
  The MES communicates with your ERP to receive the latest production orders, priorities and deadlines, bills of materials (BOM), and quality specifications for new work. It then dispatches these work orders to production and supports the process from order release to finished goods. The MES will report back to the ERP on production progress and staging, raw materials inventory, consumption/wastage data, and more. It will request replenishment of raw materials based on live consumption data, updating inventory levels dynamically as deliveries come in on a just-in-time basis. All of this data will be used to enable traceability and product genealogy for quality management purposes.
• Quality management
  The MES monitors materials moving through the line, recording data such as which machines last processed the units, which batch they came from, and what specific operations have occurred. It will also perform quality cheques to spot and flag any defects so that they don’t continue downstream. Capture of batch IDs and related information help teams to forensically identify defects and the cause of production errors. This ensures product quality, keeps you compliant, and helps to reduce waste. By enforcing process steps, MES gives you confidence that each stage of production meets predefined quality standards before advancing.
• Material handling and logistics
  As materials move through the manufacturing process, their flow can be subject to variations due to minor interruptions or delays, just like traffic on a highway. By tracking and adjusting this flow, the MES works to prevent jams and keep the line flowing smoothly. For example, it can engage in “pull operations”, pre-ordering materials to anticipate upcoming production and reduce lead times, or adjust the work-in-progress inventory to avoid overproduction. These operations are performed autonomously, allowing production to continue without interruption even if the ERP is offline.
• Maintenance management
  In addition to data about production and inventory, the MES also monitors and reports on the physical pipeline itself. It records the total operating time of equipment in your IoT network, and logs other information available from sensors, such as operating temperature and vibration data. This information supports early detection, diagnosis, and preemptive repair of potential issues. Data-driven maintenance scheduling also helps you reduce downtime and boost performance metrics. This helps you to optimise asset utilisation and service life, and to plan for future upgrades, expansion or retooling.
• Energy monitoring and optimisation
  With today’s increasingly urgent need to reduce energy costs and environmental impact, the MES is uniquely positioned to identify opportunities to improve both cost and energy efficiency. Its data-driven insights can serve to adjust energy usage where possible – for example, to run certain energy-intensive tasks at night when rates are lower, or to make best use of on-site energy storage where available. It can also identify energy-intensive stages of production and their associated costs. This allows you to make production line adjustments that boost energy savings. Data insights also allow you to more accurately determine the ROI on replacing older or less efficient equipment.

Cloud MES is a cloud-hosted, web-based version of a traditional MES that provides real-time visibility, automation, and control over production processes via the internet. Instead of being installed on local servers, Cloud MES runs on a remote data centre, which can be your own or third party, allowing manufacturers to access it from anywhere.

Cloud MES is often offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), meaning companies subscribe to it instead of purchasing and maintaining their own servers and IT infrastructure. This permits seamless application upgrades, security patches, and other updates and enhancements.

Conclusion

Before the advent of digitalisation, one of the major obstacles to resiliency and adaptability was the extremely high latency of information transmission. Delays inherent to a fragmented pipeline meant information would not reach key decision makers until days, weeks, or even months after the fact. Today, an MES can detect and communicate crucial information and relay it in actual time to on-site staff and centralised executives. What’s more, in many cases, the system will have already taken remedial measures before issues even occur. By automating the many tasks of manufacturing and digitalising the flow of information, the MES integrates fragmented, disparate information streams into a single source of truth, significantly reducing the friction and overhead of coordinating large scale enterprises. This visibility can radically enhance your resiliency and agility in today’s complex and dynamic market.