As supply chain challenges increase because of increasing supply chain complexities, organizations are increasingly looking at leveraging data and analytics tools and technologies to help them address their supply chain challenges. Manufacturing plays a crucial role in supply chain networks, and recent events have emphasized its importance in building supply chain resiliency and agility. We have emphasized this in our recent supply chain research reports, Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud and Process Automation in Supply Chain.  SAPinsiders are increasingly evaluating their portfolio of manufacturing systems and technologies and looking to upgrade to align with the requirements of modern manufacturing. SAPinsder's April 2022 report, Manufacturing Management and Planning Benchmark Report, will explore the pain points SAPinsiders are experiencing with their current systems, the key drivers they experience that are bringing those pain points to the forefront, and their technology roadmap to address those pain points. Digital twins capability has been consistently highlighted by SAPinsiders as key to building resilient, agile, and optimized manufacturing capability. Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), play a key role in digital twins. This article explores why they are central to manufacturing information systems architecture.​

Why Manufacturing Execution Systems are Important

To understand why Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are important, we must first understand shop floor control activities. Shopfloor control pertains to the set of activities in manufacturing control that are associated with releasing manufacturing orders to the factory, monitoring and control of the progress of those orders through various jobs and work centers, and capturing current information on the status of the orders. To categorize it further, a typical shop floor control system can be divided into 3 phases. Those three phases are: 1. Order release 2. Order scheduling and 3. Order progress. With advances in technology and computing, these three phases are increasingly being executed by a combination of computers in collaboration with humans. A significant percentage of shop floor control is now managed by automated systems. The term manufacturing execution system is associated with the solution or software that supports shopfloor control. Such a solution also typically includes the capability to respond to online inquiries concerning the status of each of the three phases mentioned above. Besides shop-floor controls, Ms systems also include features like the capability to generate process instructions, real-time inventory control, monitor machines, and tools in real-time, and track labor. MES systems are linked to other modules and business applications in an organization's information system architecture, such as quality control, maintenance, and even product design applications in an adequately designed factory management and information system architecture. Based on the high-level overview above, you can envision any architecture aiming to monitor and control manufacturing processes in real-time needs to leverage MES as a central component. SAP has multiple solutions in this area to help companies build world-class digital twin capabilities. SAP ME SAP ME allows organizations to digitize their manufacturing processes and allows them to integrate business systems using Industry 4.0 technology, in a cost-effective, high-quality, and resource-efficient way. Organizations can improve their manufacturing operations visibility with real-time information that increases manufacturing reliability and performance using solutions based on the Internet of Things (IoT). It is available as cloud and on-premise deployment and integrates seamlessly with SAP ERP. SAP DMC SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud is a manufacturing shop floor solution that supports production supervisors and workers daily on the shop floor where the products are manufactured. It is tightly integrated with SAP S/4 HANA or SAP ERP, where the production orders are planned, inventory is provisioned, and subsequent supply chain processes are triggered and processed. It connects high-level business systems and applications to manufacturing shop floor equipment. It provides comprehensive visibility across all manufacturing locations, simultaneously optimizing execution and monitoring production operations to the granular level of individual work centers.