Use these manufacturing industry technology trends to pick the best MES software

Fast, quality, advanced, more sustainable products. According to Forbes, these are the top trends for manufacturers to tackle in the coming years.

Beyond HMI/SCADA and equipment automation, operations are increasingly turning to smart factory solutions or manufacturing execution systems (MES) to empower workers, drive OEE, build for resilience, enable customization, and gain critical insights through data science.

Knowing recent manufacturing industry trends can help you pick the best MES software.

Gartner named GE Digital a Leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems for its Proficy Smart Factory (MES) software solution. The evaluation was based on specific criteria that analyzed the company’s overall completeness of vision and ability to execute.

We know MES, and we’ve done the homework for you. Uncover how to read reviews and compare solutions as we take a deep dive into the trends driving your technology decisions.

As the global economy tightens, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is the star of productivity KPIs for manufacturers. Rising costs for raw materials, energy, and transportation put workers at the center for controlling waste.

What is the solution? Doubling down on lean production practices by embedding continuous improvement into digital workflows. Operators empowered to drive OEE have visibility to data, calculators and formulas are readily available, and they can rapidly act on problems.

What started with measuring inventory and warehouse space has evolved, smart factory leaders are deploying MES with OEE modules to drive efficiency on the production floor.

For example, data-driven workers at a soft-drink manufacturer used their GE Proficy MES to discover openings for increased capacity, root-cause analytics to re-engineer their assets and processes, and deep capability analysis to optimize their planning and scheduling activities. In today’s on-demand world, digital technologies can help meet just-in-time demands of customers and modernization expectations of a churning workforce.

Emerging from the supply chain disruption of the last few years, organizations have boosted regionalization and invested in distributed manufacturing. As a result, demand is rising for enterprise-wide visibility. OT and IT convergence in manufacturing is driving unprecedented tech stack integration for business intelligence from the plant floor to the c-suite. Manufacturers who partner with technology companies that offer standards-based, suite MES solutions will have a competitive edge for enterprise-ready response time, cost-efficiency, connectivity, and scale.

According to a Manufacturing Leadership Council survey, 89% of respondents expect accelerating rates of disruptive technology adoption in the coming years. Digital transformation in manufacturing includes deployment of IIoT devices for enhanced edge information capture as well as cloud database integration for connected communications and to access high-performance computing power.

Over the last decade, these technologies have proven their value to monitor equipment for performance, optimize maintenance, reduce downtime, predict failure, automate service delivery, improve quality, and more. With this foundation in place, operations are ready to adopt digital twins, analytics, and simulation software for next-level gains.

According to Industry Week and Forrester, ecommerce sales in the B2B space have nearly doubled over the last few years, with the #1 online purchasing reason being the ability to order customized products. Knowing trends in our own consumer purchasing behavior, this is sure to accelerate! How does a scaled operation meet demands for increasingly innovative, advanced, and custom on-demand products?

By starting at the plant floor, agile manufacturing software solutions are designed to handle a variety of workflows that may arise from customer opportunities. This is accomplished by breaking-free from the rigid, purpose-built workflows of the past and designing user-friendly, drag-and-drop, modular interfaces that enable operations to flex to their own personalized needs and with the market.

By selecting an MES that can handle complex discrete, continuous process, and hybrid workflows, leaders are more prepared to win against tomorrow’s competition. Out of the box solutions help orchestrate change orders while maintaining throughput, right-size and mix batch execution, reduce changeover time while controlling quality, improve tracking for accelerated and streamlined time to market, and even enable a no-code creative operations dashboard for streaming a wide array of web-connected feeds such as PDF manuals, video and map data, CAD drawings, and more.

The movement to cloud-based MES and cloud-native historian is unlocking the potential of smart manufacturing. One of the benefits is environmental sustainability enablement. Integrating plant floor data points with cloud solutions such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure helps enterprises track, trace, and manage key impact metrics including labor, material use, process stability, quality, and water, air, gas, electricity, and steam (WAGES).

Analytics can help drive efficiencies by forming benchmarks and providing visibility to manufacturing production improvements and action areas. As global regulatory requirements heat up, particularly in the European Union, industrial leaders will face growing pressure to measure their operations impact, whether or not they are headquartered in the governing country.

As your team plans to attack the years ahead, trust an MES software vendor that listens to customers and builds for market trends in their innovation cycle. As a customer obsessed company, GE Digital strives to continue ranking among top MES companies. To us, our people matter and have continued to score high for customer support and service because to them, your user experience matters.

Together, we are on a mission with customers to empower workers, drive OEE, build for resilience, enable customization, and gain critical insights through data science. Achieving fast, quality, advanced, and more sustainable product requires smart manufacturing infrastructure that scales with your business. Be sure to select a technology partner who can walk with you through the journey.