Kanoa MES 1.14 is a major platform step forward—both in terms of Ignition compatibility and the set of MES capabilities available out of the box. This release includes our first Ignition 8.3–compatible Release Candidate, expanded support for batch, discrete, and continuous process types, and a set of improvements aimed at making OEE rollups, downtime analysis, and auditing more scalable across real-world enterprise deployments.
Below are the highlights we’re most excited about, plus links to the full release notes and downloads.
We’re excited to announce the availability of the Kanoa MES 1.14 Release Candidate, our first Kanoa MES build compatible with Ignition 8.3.
This release represents an important milestone for both Kanoa and the broader Ignition ecosystem. It reflects our commitment to staying tightly aligned with Ignition’s platform evolution—while continuing to invest heavily in new MES capabilities that help integrators and manufacturers build scalable, long-lived systems.
Ignition has become the de facto platform for industrial application development, and each major release brings meaningful improvements in performance, security, and developer experience.
Ignition 8.3 builds on the foundation established in Ignition 8.1 and introduces enhancements that make it an even stronger platform for enterprise-scale MES deployments. For organizations still running earlier versions—or planning upgrades from 8.1—Ignition 8.3 represents a natural next step in keeping systems modern, secure, and supportable.
From day one, Kanoa MES has been designed to live inside Ignition—not alongside it. Ensuring compatibility with the latest Ignition releases is critical to protecting long-term customer investments and giving integrators confidence that their MES layer will evolve with the platform underneath it.
Kanoa MES 1.14 RC is the first step in validating that compatibility with Ignition 8.3 in real-world projects.
A Release Candidate (RC) is a pre-release version of software that has:
Unlike a general availability (GA) release, an RC is not yet recommended for production deployment. Instead, it’s intended for early adopters—integrators, engineers, and technically capable teams—who want to evaluate new platform compatibility and features in non-production or controlled environments.
This is the first time we’re formally offering a Release Candidate for Kanoa MES. We’re doing this to:
Kanoa MES 1.14 is our first release supported on both the 8.1 and 8.3 platforms. Under the hood, the builds are aligned, and version numbering remains consistent—while the module name clarifies which Ignition line it targets (8.1 vs 8.3).
Kanoa MES increasingly needs to work across mixed manufacturing environments—where you might have packaging lines (discrete), extrusion or flow processes (continuous), and recipe-driven operations (batch), all inside the same enterprise.
With 1.14, assets can now be configured with a process type (including Batch), enabling Kanoa Ops to organize OEE-enabled assets more naturally and support process-appropriate calculations and analysis. For batch assets specifically, standard rates can be defined as “batch time in minutes,” and performance can be calculated accordingly.
Practically: this makes it easier to group and compare assets by “how they run,” not just where they sit in the asset tree—while setting the stage for more process-aware dashboards and analytics moving forward.
Historically, defining OEE thresholds at the asset level works—until you need consistent scoring across a site, an area, or an enterprise.
In 1.14, OEE thresholds are now inheritable throughout the asset hierarchy, which improves how OEE “rolls up” into areas, sites, and enterprise-level views. This is a foundational capability for organizations building standardized scorecards across multiple lines and facilities.
Alongside this, we’ve added an enterprise OEE analytics view that calculates and displays OEE scores at every level of an enterprise hierarchy.
Downtime isn’t always evenly distributed. Many teams find that specific products—or families of products—tend to trigger more stops, longer changeovers, or higher rates of minor stoppages.
Kanoa MES 1.14 adds “downtime by item” analysis to our downtime reporting, allowing teams to correlate downtime patterns to what was being produced—supporting more targeted continuous improvement work. (Kanoa Docs)
This is one of the most requested improvements we’ve shipped in a while.
Previously, downtime (and other states) could be assigned a single category. In 1.14, downtime categories now support a hierarchical “folder system” so teams can build structured fault trees that scale—without forcing operators to scroll through long, flat lists.
A practical example of a tiered fault system might look like:
This structure helps teams keep operator selection fast and intuitive, while giving engineers and CI teams the granularity they need for Pareto analysis and root cause programs.
Kanoa MES 1.14 introduces the Kanoa Logger, a dedicated mechanism for capturing important MES events without having them disappear into the broader Ignition gateway logs.
This is valuable for:
A new logger view is also included in the application.
As part of improvements to the Hawthorn installer, dashboard and widget installation is now handled via import—enabling Kanoa MES to ship more turnkey dashboards and widgets with each release.
New widgets added in 1.14 include:
Kanoa MES includes a large system function surface area, and accuracy/consistency in function documentation matters—especially for integrators building extensions and custom apps.
In 1.14, all 643 system functions were reviewed and rewritten to standardize documentation and correct examples.
As part of that effort, a small number of functions were modified to correct deviations in return values. If you’ve overridden views or written custom scripts that call affected functions, you’ll want to validate against the updated behavior.
To support platform refactoring (including updates required for batch/continuous enablement), 1.14 introduces a built-in Keyword Search Utility to help identify potential impact areas across projects, scripts, and tags.
The release notes call out several example keywords to search for, including changes such as oeeType → oeeEnabled, and certain functions now returning tuples.
This is especially useful for teams who maintain overridden views or have layered custom functionality on top of the Kanoa base projects.
Kanoa MES 1.14 also includes several under-the-hood improvements intended to make large deployments smoother:
assetTypeHierarchy_MAT table to improve SQL query performanceIf you’d like Kanoa help validating an upgrade path, or want feedback on an 8.3 migration plan for a large MES deployment, reach out via your usual support channel.