What's wrong with MES?

What is MES in the first place? Otherwise known as manufacturing execution system, it's a collection of applications sitting just above PLCs on the plant floor and just below ERP systems like SAP, JD Edwards, or Oracle eBusiness Suite. And therein lies the problem; as a "collection of applications," each one has its own data silo, data format, user interface and support requirements. These are apps like scheduling, production tracking, downtime tracking & OEE, quality assurance, recipe management, genealogy, maintenance maintenance management and a host of others. If you could just get them to play together it would be great.

Most of these applications have been developed by different companies, so getting any sort of consistency and interoperability is nearly impossible. That is especially true of the big "we have it all" vendors because nearly every one of them got their applications by buying smaller companies. So in actuality, each of the parts are incompatible.

Consider for a moment what it would be like if these did play well together. Maintenance management would know what production scheduling was up to and vice versa. If QA was putting product on hold then scheduling would know right away so that they could schedule something else until the problem is fixed. Line operators would know what is planned for the day. There are endless ways to gain efficiencies when every app is seamlessly interconnected by a common data store, common data format, common user interface and uniform support requirements.

A kludge of heterogeneous MES apps is also expensive to install and maintain. Attempting to make apps talk to other apps could cost months of labor for integration, testing and debugging. The IT support required afterward would be beyond burdensome because no app is like any other from a technical standpoint.

When selecting MES software it would be wise then to look at the big picture. First, consider all the apps that your organization could ultimately benefit from and then ensure they form a suite of products designed from the ground up with a common data store, uniform data format, uniform user interface and with uniform support requirements. The payback to your company could be handsome if this simple guideline is followed.

Where is the 'c' in MES?

Back in 2002, I saw the acronym cMES a lot, but now it's just called MES. So I got to wondering, what happened to the 'c'? In case you don't remember, the 'c' stands for collaborative. When I searched for the term recently I came up with only a few references, which is surprising. But then I got to thinking, MES is a more appropriate term anyway because most MES software is anything but collaborative.

MES, of course, would include applications like scheduling, downtime tracking, OEE, quality assurance, maintenance management and numerous other applications which facilitate better coordination and management of the plant floor. But to do this effectively each separate function needs to collaborate with the other, as well as with each of the stakeholders such as maintenance people, the production scheduler, quality assurance, plant floor operators, the plant manager and so forth. MES should be all about collaboration.

This would imply having a shared data scheme between applications, having a single source user authentication, being able to switch quickly between applications, and having the ability to easily interconnect with various data sources and databases as well as ERP systems. It also implies having the ability to give any stakeholder access to the system from anywhere (without technical or licensing restrictions).

MES systems that fail on any of these points will be short lived and be of limited usefulness. Those that embody these points can be credited with putting the 'c' back into MES and the winners will be the manufacturers that use them.

Where's the price?

Ever quote a job for a customer that included HMI and SCADA software? You know how it goes, you're preparing quotes late at night or on a weekend but all the sales reps are enjoying their weekend while you work hard trying to sell their software. This wouldn't be a problem if industrial software companies openly published their prices.

Why is it they are so secretive with pricing? According to an old-hand sales person I know, there are only two reasons for hiding prices. Either they want to be able to cut custom pricing for different customers (whatever they can get away with) or they are trying to suck people into a conversation so they can close a sale.

In my experience both reasons may be applicable to industrial software sales, but on the latter I might add that by conversing with you they often gather intelligence.

For the first, I've seen pricing for industrial software for a fortune 500 company (though I'm sure I wasn't supposed to see it) and it was only 39% of the very best prices I ever heard of for that software, which was shocking to me.

For the second reason, when you get pricing for industrial software the sales rep wants to know who the customer is, what the job is, who the contact is and so forth. This is problematic because sometimes when you're doing comparative pricing the rep runs out afterwards and calls on your customer directly.

Like I have said in the past, most of the policies we adopt at Inductive Automation are based on my prior experiences as an integrator. If you want to know the price of Inductive Automation software just go to our website —it's all right there. There's too much work to get done to mess around with all these goofy pricing games.

Of course, I might be missing the real reason. Are they possibly ashamed of their prices and pricing model? What do you think?

How many patches did that take???

Wow! Our integration sister company was upgrading a major HMI vendor's software this last week and it took tons of patches and tech support to get it running. I won't mention this company by name but I will tell you that it has huge market share. Probably the largest.

So how long does it take a trained expert (in their software) to upgrade from one major version to a couple above that? Bear in mind that this end-user paid for and got all the software disks for this upgrade. Out of the box it didn't work. It took five support calls, two service pack upgrades, two patches and one hot-fix to get it mostly going. There are still problems with tag database importing from the older version and work is being done on getting graphics to come across the versions still.

Maybe from an integrator's point of view this is a good thing ... you know, lots of billable hours. But as far as I'm concerned those hours could be spent on something more constructive for the end-user of this software.

Later on in this chain of events this company learned that our sister company was the one doing the work and immediately made the mental connection with Inductive Automation (even though they are two separate entities). Then they refused to provide any further support even though the end-user paid dearly for annual support.

This I take as the ultimate compliment. The market leader petrified of us? Now that is real progress.

Actually, I don't blame them. When you consider that our install only takes three minutes, that it works first time every time and that we can even do hot upgrades it's got to be scary for them.

The biggest risk I run with my saying that is best reflected in my earlier post "The Three Minute Misconception" wherein an analyst told me he thought Ignition software would be good for only lightweight applications only because it only takes three minutes to install. Of course that drives me crazy because I know, as do our customers, that Ignition actually does far more for far less cost. About a 3–10x cost advantage and as far as functionality goes it leaves the rest in the dust!

"Sounds too good to be true."

I keep hearing over and over that our software "sounds too good to be true" (followed by the refrain "but I can't find anything wrong with it"). But why would someone say it sounds too good to be true?

Sure, with Ignition you can launch hundreds of client applications (seats) for free, sure there are unlimited free data points, sure you can launch one (or a dozen) developer seats for free, sure there is an unlimited data point historian included for free as well and and I could go on and on. But still, why does it sound too good to be true?

Could it be that some people are highly suspicious of the big automation software vendors? Could it be that there is a fear that we would suddenly switch gears and start charging for these things later? I suppose that both of these things could be the case but both are unfounded fears because that's not our gig.

The thing is, we have an entirely different philosophy. We learned long ago that price gouging suppresses progress. It's been said that business runs mainly on Excel spreadsheets. My experience bears this out. But why spreadsheets? Because they are cheap, simple and easy to understand. They get the job done.

That is why we have hassle-free licensing. That is why we sell by the server only. That is why we are penetrating into the areas where there were only spreadsheets before and this is the way we want to play the game. We are happiest when we KNOW we are giving our customers value in abundance.

The Three-Minute Misconception

I almost bust a gut the other day. I was talking with an industry analyst and asked him if he'd seen our website. He said “yes” so I asked him what he took away from it. He said it looked like a great solution for lightweight applications. Incredulously, I asked him what on our site led him to the belief the software was best suited for “lightweight” applications. His response? “It only takes three minutes to install!”

Wow! If I knew that our three-minute install would be interpreted that way, I would have directed our developers install delay loops into our installation process so that it would take four hours or four days like everyone else's does!

All joking aside, I set the record straight by citing some of the massive deployments people are doing with Ignition. He soon saw, that in fact, a single Ignition server can deploy hundreds of clients, connect to dozens of SQL databases of practically any flavor, can launch one (or a dozen) concurrent developer stations, perform as a full historian and reporting engine, run on any OS platform – and a whole lot more for a single, affordable price. But he also saw it could perform as a lightweight system too.

The truth is, when you are used to dealing with 1990’s technology, DLL hell, and systems that have been over-patched by an endless string of programmers who have come and gone, you are bound to be shocked when you see what modern technology can do.