2010 July Issue – How can you ensure that your MES project is successful?

A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) provides a broad range of functionality to run all aspects of the shop floor.  During an MES project you will engage IT, Operations, Manufacturing, Quality, the executive team and other affected areas.  It’s likely to take months to scope and years to implement unless you use a road map that focuses on the main points. 

How do you pick a system to serve so many areas and make sure it’s successful?

• Outline your current systems and processes
• Create clear, written requirements for the MES project
• Prioritize requirements into groups with clear ROI impact
• Focus first on the items that produce the biggest return on investment (ROI)
• Create a phase 1 project plan with the large impact items
• Create a “parking lot” of large, complex or ill-defined items for future phases
• Complete a life-cycle cost analysis for the system over a 5-10 year life
• Get management approval for the budget and the expected ROI
• Select the right partner to provide the technology

What are the key steps for success?

1.  Choose a solution that fits your company processes. 

Consider how often you change business or manufacturing processes.  Frequent improvements will require you to find a system that provides easy change management for these.  Investigate how upgrades are handled with custom features.  How easy will it be for you to stay on the current product offering?  How costly will it be over the next 5 years to continue to upgrade?  Solutions requiring a large custom software effort almost always run over budget, take longer to go live then expected and do not produce the expected ROI.

2.  Use a phased approach to meet the needs of the entire business group.

Management wants specific reporting and real time data from the shop floor, manufacturing operations wants specific work-flow management, quality wants quality data collection and archiving and IT wants an easy implementation, upgrade and support path.  Capture all of these valuable requirements, create a priority grid and look for a system that addresses the most important of the priorities in the first phase and allows for the additional requirements to be met later.  Trying to “do it all” in the initial implementation has been the failure of a number of projects.

3.  Understand the system life-cycle costs.

Consider the initial purchase and any changes or unique capabilities that you anticipate.  What integration work is necessary to fit the project into your existing system structure? What kind of support do you expect during implementation and throughout the life-cycle?  What kind of support will your IT department need to provide?  The true life-cycle cost will determine success at meeting the ROI expectation.  Solutions requiring custom code are more difficult to support and typically have a much higher life-cycle cost than those with flexible configurability options built in.

A clear understanding of your business, its processes and requirements will pay long-term dividends for the MES project as you go through purchase, implementation and use.  CIMx Software developed a fast, efficient and productive approach to help its customers through these questions.  We provide an ROI generator, a true life-cycle cost analysis and an optimized phased-implementation as a standard part of the buying process.  Call and ask us how.