So, you’re finally ready to roll out a brand new state of the art Manufacturing Execution System using Kanoa MES. Congratulations! The road has been long: trying to justify the cost, determine the ROI, selecting the right MES solution and gaining the needed support within your organization.
Now it’s your responsibility to ensure a successful implementation, which means selecting a system infrastructure and architecture that is affordable, resilient, fast, and scales with the business. Sounds intimidating! But we have a recommended starting point…
Yes, it might seem a bit simple. But we’re huge fans of keeping it simple. Our motto is MES shouldn’t be more complicated and expensive than the process to build your product. That would be silly.
Let’s break this architecture down:
Well maybe. But let’s give it a shot! Our system is lightning fast. Seriously. And Kanoa MES is optimized so that whether you’re starting with a single asset, single site or multi-enterprise / multi-site, we’ll still probably end up recommending you start out with a single server until you reach capacity. You can spend a lot more with a multi-server architecture, but why bother if it increases your costs and complexity and doesn’t address any of your concerns? We can easily spin out more servers at a later stage.
Kanoa MES is designed for flexible scale-up and scale-out, and supports various architectures to help with capacity constraints, redundancy, or load balancing.
We built Kanoa MES on top of Ignition, so we have plenty of options to provide a seamless and uninterrupted experience on the shop-floor. Ignition provides its own redundancy configuration by way of setting up a primary/secondary server, each listening to each other. If the primary goes down, the secondary takes over.
And we can always use this configuration, but our opinion is that adding a redundant ignition server can be a double edged sword. Yes, you’re protected if your failure point stems from the primary server going down, but this redundancy can provide a false sense of security if other failure points in the system haven’t been addressed. MES software is complex and interconnected by design; so when a problem comes up it could be a Kepware server, it could be the database, it could be a network switch between the Ignition server and the database server, it could be a server update or a change to the firewall. Or it could be the network connection between the servers that make the primary and secondary both think they’re active.
So if redundancy is important and/or you want to balance the load and have servers that handle a specific site or area, simply spin up another MES server and split your assets between them.
In this architecture, each gateway is configured identically, however its domain of control is specific to certain assets and the tags to capture and store states and counts are only enabled on that server. Users can access any of the servers to configure, schedule, operate assets and view analysis of any asset. Should a server go down unexpectedly or require maintenance, one of the other servers can be configured to enable those assets to continue to capture asset states and counts or switching can be performed automatically via the gateway area network.
Database Administration is its own world and has plenty of solutions in place for disaster recovery, database backup and restore, archiving, mirroring and load balancing. Your DBA should have you covered but if they don’t, you may want to consider Kanoa’s SaaS solutions and we’ll take care of it for you.
We used to hear this quite a bit, but it has certainly become less and less over the years. As IS/IT solutions moved to the cloud, remote sites needed to figure out how they were going to be able to manufacture when they couldn’t connect to ERP, inventory management software or labor reporting systems. Installing dual redundant fiber-optic networks with backup cellular VPN was more effective than managing local instances of every system.
But if your MES implementation will be tightly coupled to production control and any spottiness will create downtime, then you’ll certainly be looking at having localized MES Servers.
In this architecture, the database servers can be set up for mirroring, or services such as HighByte can be employed to push data around. The MES enterprise server is no different than the local MES server other than it has access to data from all sites. If you want the MES Enterprise Server to be controlling rather than passive, that can be achieved using the Gateway Area network for messaging between the enterprise MES server and local MES servers, and remote tag providers.
We get it. Doesn’t matter what the failure point is, it won’t be good if it happens. Ignition provides such a flexible solution that we can at any point tweak the architecture to address identified failure points. Edge devices are cheap, so if your failure point may be a switch or cable between a PLC cabinet and the gateway server, then install an edge device in each PLC cabinet. No loss of data and a switch failure will only affect real-time visibility to that line.
But if it does happen, our Kanoa MES provides a really easy user screen to add in the missing data. Add a run, add downtime events, edit production counts. You don’t want to have to do it, but if you need to patch in a run, you can do it easily and quickly without having to touch the database.
Yes. Perhaps you should. Because at the end of the day we’re capturing a wealth of data and trying to make sense of it to drive continuous improvement. We are capturing this data so we can use it, and the more people (and algorithms) that can access that data the more it will be used and useful. If you’re going to want to start making that data available to Data Science teams and AI, getting comfortable with the cloud is an important and necessary step.
We are! Containers allow us to easily deploy our application, Ignition server and database all in one go through our CI/CD process to our Dev, QA, and Demo servers. We also host 8 docker containers on a single Linux cloud server available for anyone to try out the application. If you’d like to try it out, set up a meeting with our team through the Contact Us page.
It is! Kanoa MES is an extremely flexible solution that coupled with Ignition provides a wealth of choices for how to architect out your solution. That architecture will ultimately be dependent on the requirements (production control, redundancy, fault tolerance, compliance), system constraints (network reliability, latency, security) and budget.
And you’re not alone when it comes to mitigating risk of system failure. Inductive Automation provides a wealth of resources and they will support you in architecting the right solution for you. Cirrus Link and their MQTT modules for Ignition are also right beside you to provide a robust IIoT solution. Our Friends Of Kanoa partners 4IR Solutions’ sole purpose in life is in providing tailored manufacturing infrastructure solutions. And Kanoa’s own SaaS solutions deliver fully-managed and delivered availability and security in one place.
There are a million ways that you and your company can get started with Kanoa MES. We’ve shown how you can start with a very simple architecture with minimal investment for a proof of concept. You can scale-up and scale-out this architecture in a variety of ways to address the most urgent and important needs for your business. We encourage manufacturers to start simple, then design to address the complexities and challenges that present themselves; as opposed to over-designing for “what-if” scenarios that never occur. Kanoa MES fully supports on-premise installations, but also embraces multiple cloud architectures to reduce site-infrastructure costs and increase data visibility.
We’re always happy to talk about your requirements and what system architecture is right for you. Book a Demo with Kanoa today to learn more about Kanoa MES and start designing your system architecture today!