Part I of this blog series expanded on some of TEC’s earlier articles about companies’ need for better links between the plant (”blue collar trenches”) and the enterprise (”white collar ivory tower”). It also pointed out the difficulties in achieving this idea. An obvious solution would be a tightly integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) package that would help manufacturers close the gap between the shop floor and the offices by gaining visibility into manufacturing operations, achieving shop floor control, managing product/process traceability, genealogy, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Those that follow manufacturing-oriented enterprise applications have likely noticed for some time an uptick of conversations about the need to better integrate high-speed manufacturing operations (the real-time world of the plant) with the planning and engineering departments (the transactional and design world of enterprise systems). The nirvana (or utopia) hoped for thus far has been to provide a single point of operation and control for manufacturers to: Plan, Define, Control, Execute, and Analyze Production.

Why do we need integrated manufacturing operations, or manufacturing execution systems (MES) linked to transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, likely via some plant-level integration hub and visualization & intelligence layer? Read the rest of this entry »