For decades, technology has helped companies to streamline their manufacturing process through Planning Software.
Although AI software has expanded the scope and speed of the manufacturing process in recent years, shop floor technologies in their commercial form have been improving production lines since well before their current iteration in the 1990s.
However, even though these technologies have been widely available for decades and whose benefits are often talked about, lots of manufacturing plants out there still refuse to get rid of their excel spreadsheets!
In this week’s interview, I sit down once again with DELMIA’s Strategic Business Development and Marketing Director Mike Bradford to discuss three big advantages of adopting MOM software in your manufacturing facilities.
Since MOM is often talked about alongside MES, he will also touch upon some of its strengths while also talking about the industry tendency to give the software a “little brother” reputation.
Without further ado, let’s hear what Mike has to say about MOM software:
Gene: At this point, MES solutions have been around for several decades. As someone whose spent almost two decades selling/understanding manufacturing solutions, why do you think the market has not been able to leverage MES solutions by being fully implemented; for that matter, what makes Delmia easier to implement and drive this change in manufacturing point?
Mike: I think what’s driven some of the difficulty is that early on, the terms “MES” was often used interchangeably with MOM. So, MES as a software and concept has been blurry for a lot of years. Over time, the distinction has been clarified over the course of its use.
Mike: I think another big part of it is not necessarily knowing the best place to put MES because you got SCADA and HMI systems, you got ERP systems, you got Planning Systems; where do you put MES in that whole system architecture? Again, the concept of placement is a huge hurdle; especially when the software needs to communicate with so many different systems.
Mike: Again, that’s always been an advantage of MOM; with MOM, you cut down the number of integration points that you have to have which streamlines the whole process.
Mike: But, if you’re talking just standalone MES and why it hasn’t caught on over the years, you’ve got a tremendous number of integration points and communication points that you need to think about and that’s what really slowed it down.
Mike: The Delmia brand of Dassault provides a business management-based solution. So, I think a low code configuration solution – Dassault has their own configuration application – that enables you to configure it to do what you want it to do. With that said, let’s go from the difficulties of MES software to why I believe DELMIA APRISO MOM is better!
Mike: I’ve worked at three or four MES companies over the years and worked with more than that. There are three key advantages that I see to how Dassault and DELMIA APRISO approach the MOM Solution.
Mike: Number one -which I have already referred to – is the configurability. It’s not an out-of-the-box solution where you set a few flags, but you have to use it the way it is. It’s configurable, but it’s not just a tool set either because you’re not building everything from scratch. We have a portfolio of over 1200 business components. These components range from something as granular as doing traceability on a single part or ensuring all the right data is there to do something quite broad like receiving against an ASN or kitting.
Mike: Granted, multiple different business components can all work together, but it’s configurable according to your needs and your IP on your shop floor; and that also includes the user interface! That’s another place where MES systems struggle; people on the shop floor get used to doing things a certain way and now you bring in this new system and it looks totally different, acts totally different. Sometimes it’s good because you have to change the way you do things to improve, but sometimes it leads to resistance and people on the shop floor don’t want to use it.
Mike: By providing that configurability, you work with your company decides what “ease of use” mean to you and configure accordingly or “what are our key manufacturing capabilities that give us advantage” and configure accordingly.
Mike: So that’s the first strength of MOM; the configuration piece.
Mike: The second is just the breadth of the solution. The fact that it does include all of the different components of MOM.
Mike: Now, you don’t have to buy and use all of them at once; we don’t recommend you try and do everything at once as there are way too much to learn all at once. However, it is all on a single database; so, that you can pick one piece and start there and expand over time.
Mike: By taking this approach, you don’t have to worry about things like, “did I do something in production that now is not going to work in quality” or “did I do something in warehouse that’s not going to now work in production”? It’s all single database schema; it’s a single product.
Mike: So, the breadth of the software is a second advantage.
Mike: The third advantage is our unique global capabilities.
Mike: A lot of companies will talk about a Center of Excellence (COE) and – in most cases – they’re talking about a location and a team. A lot of ERP companies, or a lot of ERP users, have a global or at least regional ERP instance and that’s their Center of Excellence and they’ve got guys there that run the ERP for all the plants. When we talk Center of Excellence, we’re talking about that.
Mike: We’re also talking about the ability to take that configuration that I just discussed and govern that according to how your plants would like to use and/or need to use it; so, you can take that configuration and share it across all of your plants or share it selectively for if you get assembly plant versus a fabrication plant. They may have different pieces of that configuration preferences that they use, but you can manage it all from your Center of Excellence
Mike: You can govern it all from there, you can determine which plants can share peer-to-peer when they come up with new processes, or you can defer it up to the COE where someone there decides, “Yes, that’s a good process! We’re going to send it out like that!”
Mike: If you defer process creation to the COE, once you’ve pushed out those processes to the production plants, MOM gives you visibility on whether or not the production preferences have already been released to the facility, whether currently being used, and if they’ve already made adjustments to the process.
Mike: Because, again, this is where a lot of companies will say, “just take a copy of your solution from Plan A and drop it into Plan B!” This works just find unless somebody at Plan B decided they don’t like something and changed that template. And, of course, once Plan A makes that change without knowing that, now they’ve lost all control/visibility of it; and the next time, even if you do make the change, you still don’t know what’s going to work at Plan B!
Mike: So, that ability to that and to manage these processes from the Center of Excellence with something we call the DELMIA APRISO Global Process Manager is the 3rd key differentiator.
Mike: So – in conclusion – the three big features of DELMIA MOM software that differentiate us from others in the market.: configurability, breadth of the product and global capabilities.
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D4M is a privately owned company specializing in leveraging digital technologies to accelerate manufacturing clients to their transition to Industry 4.0. With long tenure and hundreds or successful projects, we are confident that our approach and experience provides the roadmap to help bring clarity and efficiency to your manufacturing operation.
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