MESA (Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association) International describes itself as a global community of manufacturers, producers, industry leaders, and solution providers who are focused on driving business results through the intelligent application of manufacturing information. (Essentially, it is the space where manufacturing technology and IT collide.)
The organisation’s primary goal is to contribute positively to both the business results and the production processes of its member organisations, which it does through access to a central repository of experiential white papers, as well as guidebooks and knowledge shared through the results of original research. To date this archive contains over 1000 such publications, available only to members.
MESA International is a vendor independent body staffed by a group of volunteers all passionate about continuous improvement in manufacturing through the ideas of asset performance management, lean manufacturing, product lifecycle management, and more recently, the concept of the real-time enterprise. The only paid staff are the president and a handful of administration personnel. MESA Africa is the local chapter and is staffed by volunteers from vendors, system integrators and manufacturers.
MES in the early days
Some eight years ago, Daniel Spies and Gerhard Greef, together with Deon Engelbrecht (Rockwell Automation, now in Australia), organised an ‘MES Conference’ at the Indaba Hotel that sparked the interest of the local manufacturing fraternity, and ultimately led to the formation of MESA Africa.
Daniel and Gerhard met about 10 years back on a large MES project both were involved in at Sappi. “This was back in the days when manufacturers took a ‘big bang’ approach,” explains Daniel. “MES was seen as a ‘software suite’ and people believed you needed to implement everything in order to get results.”
These suites of MES software were very expensive to buy, costing almost as much as the ERP systems of the day. This was a conundrum for Daniel and the team at Sappi as they neither needed all the facets of the functionality, nor did they have the budget to pay for them.
“This is when we came across Gerhard at Bytes (now Bytes Universal Systems),” says Daniel thoughtfully. “He had just authored a book titled ‘E-Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management’, which gave people an accurate insight into the structure and the framework of MES.”
This was exactly the orientation that the team at Sappi required. “Now we were in a position to evaluate any of the current MES offerings – from suppliers like Aspen Tech, ABB and Honeywell – and match them against our own specific operational requirements on a cost versus benefit basis,” adds Daniel, as the penny begins to drop for the rest of us.
The real value of a vendor agnostic organisation like MESA is found in the extensive networks of expertise members have at their disposal to help them resolve highly specific manufacturing or supply chain related problems. It heralded the dawn of a new era for manufacturing in southern Africa.
The spark of interest that ignited that first conference had become a fire and MESA Africa was born out of the special interest group which gathered at the Indaba Hotel that day to share ideas about this ‘new technology’.
Best-of-breed solutions emerge
When the housing bubble burst in 2008, the global economy crashed and the resultant freeze in spending on new IT projects forced a rethink in the way MES projects would be done in the future.
“Our budgets dried up,” explains Daniel in measured tones. “We were told to innovate and make do with what we had. It forced us to take a new approach and focus only on that which was relevant to the specific business problem at hand.”
Gerhard describes it as the second phase of innovation in MES. The result was a proliferation of ‘best-of-breed’ solutions that emerged to challenge the aristocracy of the all encompassing ‘dream liners’ of the past. These new MES products were agile and tightly targeted towards specific problems, and they could be combined if the functionality of one did not go far enough. The end user community had started to look for good business solutions, rather than just good engineering platforms.
“These days, it is all about solving business problems,” emphasises Gerhard, joining the conversation forcefully. “End users now break their problems down into bite (sic) size chunks, and then resolve these in order of priority. There needs to be a measurable cost benefit relationship before they will do anything. The ‘best-of-breed approach however has led to the proliferation of ‘point-to-point’ interfaces as the need for information sharing increases daily.”
Standards win the day
One of the limitations of these nimble new packages is that they cannot integrate effectively unless they are underpinned by an appropriate body of standards.
“A significant benefit that accrued out of the financial crisis is that we were forced to adopt intelligent standards, or we could not continue,” contextualises Daniel. “It all hinged on interoperability, which is extremely difficult to achieve without a set of universal standards when both project budget and resources are tightly constrained.”
This is one of MESA’s most noteworthy contributions to industry. “Systems became ecosystems, which included the company’s ERP platform,” explains Daniel. “To that end, MESA was instrumental in the development of the ISA 88 and ISA 95 standards, which it did through working groups that operated in conjunction with the various standards committees, as well as overall comment and evaluation when the draft documents were complete.”
“Typically a standard gets developed from the top down,” adds Gerhard. “Once the basic concepts are defined then the specific activities, transactions and protocols to support it will be developed.”
Primarily, this is the level at which MESA makes its contribution. A good example is the cross communication required between systems when a bill of materials update occurs.
“That is an important part of the value that MESA adds,” interjects Daniel. “But there is another aspect; ultimately MESA provides guidelines to industry on how best to implement these standards, utilise them effectively, and the level of ROI that can be expected when they do.”
This might be just the beginning. An emergent new technology – which nobody fully understands yet – promises to disrupt the need for interoperable systems by at least one quantum level in performance. It is known as the Industrial Internet of Things and it is the darling of tech marketers everywhere.
So what is this Internet of Things (IoT) anyway?
Mckinsey defines the IoT as the physical world transformed into an information system through sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects and linked through wired and wireless networks via the Internet Protocol.
“The IoT is something everyone is talking about, but nobody really understands where the value lies,” says Gerhard, laughing a little. “MES was like this too in the early days, until people became more educated about things.”
“End users came to understand that MES is not a silver bullet that can fix any business related problem that exists because of bad manufacturing practices or ineffective business processes,” adds Daniel. “And the same is true of the IoT.”
“The IoT is nothing more than an information sharing framework,” says Gerhard, cutting decisively through the haze of marketing that has clouded the subject for the last few years. “It is a platform for exposing device related data in real time. If you do not do anything with it, or it is the wrong data, then it has no practical value.”
“MES has been doing this for decades,” explains Daniel, “all that the IoT changes are the depth and breadth of the information, as well as the speed with which the data can be collected and analysed.”
“That’s correct,” agrees Gerhard. “IoT is MES, but extended to the whole world.”
The IoT then is an extremely powerful computer network able to capture vast amounts of real-time manufacturing data, contextualise it, and then present it to management in a way that facilitates decision making designed to improve the organisation’s profitability.
The value, at least in a manufacturing context, is the richness of the data analytics translated into metrics that are more powerful than anything that has gone before. The key organisational question thus becomes: “If we have a well defined system of manufacturing related metrics in place, what advantages do we have over our competitors who do not?”
“This is an area where MESA is particularly strong,” explains Gerhard. “There are myriads of metrics that can be used to evaluate a factory’s performance. One of the things MESA does is to look at which of those the top quartile is measuring in any particular industry.
“This is then used to establish how best to develop a proper metrics framework, and, while this may vary from industry to industry, the information is freely available to all registered members. This is a significant benefit to any manufacturer wanting to earn, or keep their place in, that top twenty-five percent.”
Revelations and such
While MES is an extremely powerful productivity tool when it is applied correctly, it is not a patchwork quick-fix for a badly designed or outdated manufacturing process. While the IoT is an extremely powerful framework for real-time data capture, it adds no value for manufacturers unless the proper levels of contextualisation and decision making are applied.
The idea of using metrics to leverage a competitive advantage in manufacturing is nothing new. The trick now is to understand how the technologies of MES and the IoT are about to create the disruptive era of ‘metrics on steroids’, and how MESA and standards can help you survive them.
For more information contact Daniel Spies, MESA Africa, +27 (0)83 666 6854, [email protected], www.mesa-africa.org
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