What's in a name? MES Across Industry Verticals

We don’t always go to the dictionary to figure out the meaning of a term (or, in this case, hundreds of pages of ISA standards). Most of the time we pick it up through context clues and how it’s used in our everyday environment, or friends and colleagues explain their understanding to us.

It’s very common to find different interpretations of the term “MES” depending on how one was introduced to the concept or how MES systems were used in a specific plant or industry. A couple of examples:

In the Auto industry it is not uncommon to hear the term MES used interchangeably with “track and trace.” This is probably because traceability is the most important aspect of a MES in an auto plant. Every part of every vehicle must be serialized and tracked through the manufacturing process and assembly. 

In the Food and Beverage industry, MES frequently refers to OEE and Downtime Tracking systems. One of the first systems I worked on as a Systems Integrator was to configure data for a large Food and Beverage company’s “MEGA MES” system, which was an (impressive) enterprise-wide OEE system but did not address any other features commonly associated with a MES.
In the Life Sciences industry, MES is much closer to its comprehensive ISA-95 definition and may cover Production, Quality, Inventory, and Maintenance all in one platform. The intense validation process required for the highly-regulated Life Science industry leads many manufacturers to reduce the total number of platforms and changes they need to manage in their plant. They are more likely to make a large investment in an off-the-shelf MES platform that does everything to reduce the validation cycles they will need.

This mixing-and-matching of definitions gets slightly more confusing with the evolution of Industry 4.0. With more systems producing and consuming more data, the software functions that may have resided in a clear MES “box” before can now live in various systems throughout the factory; like edge devices tracking their own OEE, or a cloud-based solution to drive quality forms from paper to glass.

So MES is a term that does have a formal and standards-driven definition, but also has different meanings depending on your environment and manufacturing industry. If you are only familiar with MES in the context of your factory, it may be helpful to look outside your industry for other capabilities and best practices that could fuel your productivity.