A large collection of MES issues you care about

At present, the concept and terminology of manufacturing enterprises' management software for smart factories, especially those directly related to production, quality, equipment and personnel, are generally vague. Words such as "machine networking", "MES", "factory Internet of Things", "industrial Internet of Things", and "industrial Internet" are all flooding the managers and CIO brains of enterprises at all levels. Among them, the title of MES is led by world giants such as SIMENS, MPDV, ROCKWELL, SAP, and the overwhelming publicity of Industry 4.0 and Made in China 2025. The project with the strongest investment willingness in China.

In 2013, Shenkote's thick hair style penetrated into this field. In the past 7 years, Shenzhen Kete has contacted thousands of manufacturing enterprises in the province, researched and compiled hundreds of MES technical solutions, and independently implemented and deployed hundreds of large and medium-sized MES projects, serving more than hundreds of factories. Such feelings and experiences can continue to hear the real voice from the manufacturing industry, better understand the needs of the manufacturing industry, and can also collect the most urgent information needs of industrial enterprises in the front line.

The following are the real quotations about MES from CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, engineers and front-line employees during our company's MES survey and program demonstration in recent years.

(1) "Do you have any related industry cases, we have to visit first."

There were really few successful cases of MES seven years ago. Shen Kete focused on the electronics manufacturing industry in the early years, and visit cases that meet the needs of customers in other industries are even scarce. After all, there are interlaced mountains. When there are some machinery and the needs of the injection molding industry, we deeply feel that the oil-controlled industrial control screen or the splicing screen of the command center on the machine tool is full of various line charts, scatter plots and radar charts. It is said that the equipment docking is like an insurmountable mountain. For them, the case study of the electronics manufacturing industry is at most just a lively bustle. But in recent years, with continuous investment in R&D and continuous polishing of products, Shenkote has already possessed successful cases in machinery and injection molding industry.

(2) "Can your software give us a free trial first?"

Different manufacturing companies may also have completely different production processes and management processes. Therefore, MES software for vertical industries needs to be customized and developed, and free trial of finished software can easily lead to poor customer experience. Or the experience function is not the core requirement of the customer.

(3) "The foreign equipment used in our factory has its own management system with complete data."

Equipment is often affiliated with independent production units, and unit managers will not start with the overall picture. "How do these equipments compare with the production efficiency of equipment that produces the same products in other workshops? Have they been quantitatively analyzed and compared? Are the analysis indicators objective?" Although customers see the data, they can't mine value from the device data. "As a device manager, how do you use this data, or is it related to improving product quality?"

(5) "Everyone at home and abroad has been using it, and it has been difficult to use it for several years. What kind of MES is cheating money."

The customization cost of a single function of MES of a foreign company even exceeds the authorization cost of the entire platform; the agency of a foreign company is completely developed by Chinese engineers on a foreign platform. The quality of the delivery system is almost independent of the quality of the platform; How does a limited budget guarantee quality? We have always believed that there are no cheap and good products in the world, let alone free lunch. It turns out that you have spent so much money on "made in China".

(6) "We have an independent management and control system, which overlaps with MES, and repeated purchases will increase costs."

With the continuous improvement of the ERP system, it gradually sinks and realizes some MES functions. The newly introduced production equipment, which comes with and gradually develops management software, also implements some MES functions, and the market is flooded with functions independently developed for each small production link, such as traceability systems and machine networking, which can also meet specific needs. . This is also one of the reasons why companies cannot accept the introduction of brand new MES at a high price. But they are independent, and the data is not interconnected. How much manpower do you spend, how to export the data and conduct cross-department integration analysis, this is a question worth pondering.

(7) "Our industrial data is open to you, who guarantees information security?"

Industrial data is very likely to be leaked, and once it happens, it will be very harmful. The use of a private cloud is a concern for developers to leak, and the use of a public cloud is even more worried about platform leaks. There have even been cases where customers specified to choose Telecom Cloud instead of Alibaba Cloud, only because Telecom Cloud originated from state-owned enterprises. It is conceivable that if you get the process data, it is not difficult to easily copy a product or a company.

(8) "Can MES reduce staff and increase efficiency?"

Customers often compare MES with automation transformation. Automation transformation does have a qualitative and intuitive effect on the reduction of production line personnel, the increase of production efficiency and the pass rate. After the MES goes online, it is very difficult to calculate the reduction in staff efficiency, which cannot be measured by data indicators.

(9) "Why do you need to pay extra for the deployment of the second factory? Isn't it good to copy the software?"

Because MES and production are closely related, even if the product and process flow are "almost", from the perspective of software implementation, it is still impossible to achieve secondary deployment only through parameter modification. "Because each factory equipment is in its own array, the interaction mode and interface are very different, and it is impossible to complete deployment by simply copying."

(10) "Need to build a platform for us, can the software source code be provided to us?"

Customers of industrial enterprises have a strong desire for private cloud, as well as the exclusiveness of software platforms. They hope to increase productivity through partners' new technologies, but they do not want to be kidnapped by suppliers, so they propose to form their own software R&D team, but it is not clear how difficult it is to form a full-stack R&D team within traditional manufacturing enterprises. I once encountered a case where the client suggested that the .NET framework must be used and that the source code for the secondary development part should be provided because they only have C# programmers.