Digital Transformation Initiative: Cloudification of MES
With the advancement of cloud native applications and the thrust for a cloud-first approach, almost every organization is seeking transformation of their applications and systems. While the applications on the top of the stack of ISA-95 are rapidly undergoing infrastructure reorientation and are cloudified through SaaS/PaaS solutions, there has been a strong and reasonable resistance towards application migration to the cloud, especially those hosted on the production floor and belonging to the lower part of the ISA-95 stack (primarily Level 2 applications). Organizations are not considering moving their plant applications to the cloud. Instead, they prefer to interface with cloud apps through Edge.
This journal focuses on the positioning and management of MES-MOM, which forms the basis of Level 3 applications. MES is a component of MOM that supports the complete stream of manufacturing processes from production execution, quality management, logistics and materials, covering the 4Ms – Man, Material, Machine and Methods of Manufacturing. MOM is the larger ecosystem that ensures strategic optimization and insights into the manufacturing processes, emphasizing production, quality, maintenance, and inventory and seeking overall advancements of KPIs, thus facilitating OEE improvements.
MOM is primarily responsible for collecting data from southbound systems, including plant applications related to production, quality, warehouse, inventory and HSE, amongst others, there is equal responsibility on the northbound Level-4 systems like ERP and PLM for Production Orders, Quality Results, Backflush and other data updates. MES–MOM has traditionally been set on-premises closer to plant applications for a seamless experience and to eliminate business disruptions.
As businesses look forward to being cloud-first and navigating their next steps, they must move MES – MOM systems to cloud. Maintaining MES systems on-premises for large enterprises requires enormous investment, cost of ownership and infrastructure maintenance. As cloud democratizes and harmonizes data, applications and interfaces across the enterprise, it is reasonable for businesses to want the move.
