Transcript of Why Customers Build their MES — Preserving their Processes

why is it organizations build their mes rather than buy it off the shelf take part two take zero [Music] all right so if you guys watch the last Whiteboard video which was two weeks ago and you can check out the link here here whatever if you watch that video a couple of weeks ago one of our Solutions Architects reached out to me and said you know hey Walker that was a really awesome Whiteboard video um and it got me thinking you should do another video and you should explain an actual example of a solution that we built for a customer that we wouldn't they would not have been able to buy off the shelf okay so um and I'm so what I've decided to do is in this video I'm actually going to go through that example all right so a quick reminder you know the the manufacturing workflow uh organizations they sell stuff in their CRM they plan to sell plan to manufacture in their Erp they execute the manufacturing in the mes layer they monitor and control their plant in the scada layer they monitor and control machines on the plant floor they inventory their stuff they ship their stuff and they sell their their stuff and they they buy their raw materials in the case of this client that we're going to talk about today okay the client has a CRM that's unconnected okay so uh they I think they were using it doesn't matter what they were using but they were using a really basic CRM their Erp functions okay plus arap plus all their inventory was Homebrew and here is a really important concept okay the competitive advantage that this client has is based in the way that they structured their enterprise resource planning okay so the the triggers the events everything that they built in their Erp system is what gives them their competitive advantage in the market okay and so if what you were going to do was buy try to buy a manufacturing execution system off the shelf and try to plug it into their Homebrew Erp system you would you know you'd be out of luck there'd be no connector to connect to their Homebrew Erp system moreover if what you were to do is just go get sap and pull it off the shelf okay sap wouldn't be able to be configured for this client okay all right on the plant floor so at the mes layer they were all paper okay so what in in this the center of the universe for this organization was a job jacket a very Advanced uh paper manufacturing execution system all right and then on the plant floor they had incredibly Advanced PLC HMI primarily Siemens d445 motion controllers running most of their assets okay super Advanced uh PLC HMI primarily Siemens uh d445 motion controllers uh and then some flavors of Omron all right so our our one of our Architects he actually he sends me this message in teams after the last Whiteboard video and he says hey you really ought to talk about this specific use case for this client that we built their their manufacturing execution system in okay so the customer what the customer needed was production scheduling right so you guys I mean most of this is abstracted because it's obviously client data we don't want you to be able to see any of the important stuff but what you're looking at here is their paper scheduling board that their operations team uses on the plant floor and then you have the printed out schedule okay right here okay and then what they ultimately wanted was a digital scheduler that would integrate into their manufacturing execution system which we were building in parallel with the core four right so the goal here is to take the center of their Universe which is their job jacket this fancy scheduling board that they've got in their supervisor's office this piece of paper that's printed out on engineering paper that says here are all the jobs that we're going to run in order and what we want to do is we want to integrate that into a Enterprise class mes system all right so how are we going to do that well what we're going to do is where our goal is to take the job jacket that we have up here in the upper left hand corner which is their Center of their Universe I'm going to kind of explain why that is this is so valuable for them we're going to take the scheduling board that they have in the supervisor's office which has many of these job jackets we're going to take this printed copy that the supervisor carries around the organization and we're going to build it and we're going to build it in conjunction with a manufacturing execution system similar to what I talked about in the last Whiteboard video all right so in order for us to do that we're going to do the core 4 plus custom all right so I'm gonna I'm gonna sketch out at a high level maybe five five thousand foot view how this is all going to piece together right so in a in a core mes system the center of the universe is going to start Isa 95. all right so I'm going to end up with tables for Enterprise site area line and sell okay so this is going to structure my business then what I'm going to do is I'm going to have tables for work orders okay I'm going to have a schedule table and I'm going to have a run table okay I'm going to create work orders work orders is work orders in the mes system in in the mes World equals job jacket at this customer okay we're going to take a work order we're going to schedule it and then an operator is going to start it as a production run and what we want to be able to do is take their existing business process not redefine it not try to fit uh try to change the way their business process operates just so it fits in some off-the-shelf mes system we're going to try and make it work for them okay so our goal is to connect what we want to do is we want to using mes custom so using some mes custom schema or database what we're going to do is we're going to create all the custom elements for this customer so what we're going to do is we are going to create a job jacket all right whatever that's what they called it they call it a job jacket and then we'll have tied to the job Jacket we'll have all of the specifications for the job jacket and then there will be another section that's going to handle all of their events okay and this is a really important piece I'm going to go back here real quick part of the thing that makes this business so competitive in their industry and the reason they're able they're they're a smaller manufacturer but they compete with enormous manufacturers and kill them in the market the reason why is the Brilliance of their manufacturing workflow so and it's all centered around this job jacket concept all right but essentially there are a series of events uh we call them manufacturing steps in the Erp world but there are a series of events that they track on paper they're triggers and if I get if I get through this many this manufacturing step I can then move on to the next manufacturing step the problem is they're not linear some of them happen in parallel so a trigger the trigger for the Second Step may happen halfway through the first step okay so what we have to do is be able to incorporate that into our digital system all right so what we're going to do is we're going to start out with our mes core4 and so for those of you who are in the core mes boot camp so if you guys are in the original core mes boot camp this schema is the ISA 95 schema for manufacturing execution systems and this is exactly what we taught you how to build so what we did here was we did work order schedules and run and then what we did is we had histories so we have count history and we have State history over here and what we do is we have an OE engine we have an oee engine that runs it goes and grabs our our um all the events that we've stored based on the structure of our organization and then we can calculate oee by work order by schedule by production run by asset et cetera et cetera et cetera what we're doing is we're extending that here with the blue stuff and tying their existing job jacket system into this core4 manufacturing execution system something you just can't do with off-the-shelf software okay all right so what does it look like when we're all done okay well the first thing that we have to do is we also have to tie this into a unified namespace so now what I've got is a schema on the back end we've got our schema which we've built out and then we and then what we do is we build out our unified namespace which is a representation of our schema you guys won't be able to see it very clearly on here because there's obviously protected information we made this all blurry but in a nutshell what we have here is the ISA 95 structure okay what we have here is all of the real-time automation data from The Edge from all the smart stuff on the plant floor and what we have here is a combination of our unique custom elements in the namespace and the core4 mes elements here so real-time specification data and our mes and oee data from Erp and the mes engine all right so that's how the unified namespace plays here everything I'm going to show you subsequently coming out of this so the back end that drives all the event management and transactions is here the definition for that's going to go ahead and create digital job jackets and tie them into the core4mes system is there the unified namespace that puts it all together so that all consumers in our organization can interoperate with that data seamlessly publish and consume seamlessly is structured like this and here are the results all right so the first thing we have is we have a digital job jacket this digital job jacket what we're looking at here on the screen here is the exact same thing that you saw a couple of sides earlier we have the exact same events that make this organization valuable and the it gives them the ability to manage really low volume work orders and do changeovers super super quickly and still be profitable right here those events are tracked here in the blue area so you have definitions plus event storage transaction storage so we've got a digital job jacket this digital job jacket all the stuff that we have in here is the comes it comes from their Homebrew Erp system and it is Manifest through what it is that has been custom built in this core4 mes system so we have a job jacket and it and because we have a job jacket now what we have is a digital job board so instead of having a physical board with a bunch of piece of papers on it now we have a digital one and that digital one is connected to the manufacturing execution system so now when we run a production order so when I start a job on a production line at this specific client I'm not starting a work order in the mes system I'm starting a job jacket in their Erp system and I'm mapping it to a work order in the mes system and the job jacket ID is the work order it is not some abstracted work order from my um uh wonderwear mes system it is not some extracted work order from my Traxxas mes system it is the job jacket ID from their Erp system nothing has changed in terms of the way that their business operates their operators didn't have to learn anything new what that what they used to physically interact with in terms of paper and a board in the supervisor's room is now just a digital interaction that they activate they interact with on a dashboard at the production line and in the supervisor's office so now what we have is the is the digital uh the digital schedule or digital job board there what we've done is we've added in color-coded States so now instead of them walking up to the physical pieces of paper and looking at the check boxes now what they can do is from a from a distance they can see the status of each of these individual jobs including each of those events which make this organization so incredibly valuable and that is in terms of them being able to streamline their manufacturing processes so we got the job Jordan and now what we have is a digital or scheduler so the jobs here are a manifestation of this digital schedule so when I go back and I look at the job jacket which is on the job board which is located there when I'm looking at it on the schedule what I'm doing is I'm looking at it connected to our core4 mes system this extended custom element which is job jacket which is a direct digital manifestation of what they already had on the plant floor their existing business process is now connected to what it is we know as manufacturing execution scheduling and so when I look at my scheduler I'm looking at my scheduler this is a mes scheduler that is scheduling their job jackets which are extended customized right and so then what the last thing that we want to do is we want to take data that they have on the plant floor so some raw data that comes off of their individual equipment so what you're looking at here and I don't know if you guys can see it but what we're looking at here is a series is historical job jackets okay so this is because they were using the existing job jacket system uh every time an operator would start a production run they would type the job jacket ID into the HMI on their machine okay and it would be stored in a SQL database on the machine and that data was never used basically what they would do is they would that machine the the asset which is a 25 million dollar asset would collect process data over time over the course of of time while the production run was running they would type the job jacket in and then the the machine itself would collect uh process data so for example what we're looking at here is we're looking at a deck temperature set point the actual deck temperature the tunnel the tunnel temperature here and the tunnel temperature set point and the tunnel temperature so what we're looking at for this job jacket we're looking at here is history that have been collected for like the last 10 years before the digital mes system had ever been built and if what we had done was put by an off-the-shelf mes system we don't keep the job jacket structure of the business which makes them valuable we would never be able to tie the historical process data seamlessly to the new digital mes system but we were able to do that simply because we didn't change the way the business operated what we did was we digitally transformed the organization and through a combination of digital transformation and a combination combination of digitization which is what we did with the job jacket right so now what I've got here is I could go back just by virtual building this what we could do is we could we could say I want to look at all the jobs I've run over history on this machine using this product code the product codes tied to the job jacket and I want to look at the process history and this was a game changer for this organization because overnight by us custom building this mes system what they were able to do was just select a row and look at so this job jacket was run if you look at the dates July 31st 2019 August 1st August 2nd August 2nd August 3rd August 4th August 5th and it goes all the way but this is one of the most common product codes goes back like 10 years and all they all they had to do was select a row and they could just scroll down and they could look at how operate how operators set up the machine differently over time relative to the way they set it up now for the same product that is visibility they had absolutely they had no visibility into that and if we hadn't custom built the job jacket um the job jacket function they would have never been able to connect that data together okay right so what did it look like in the end classic mes right we have work order information up here in the upper left hand corner work order in this case equals job jacket but it looks like work order we have overall equipment effectiveness in this case based on production run we have all of our downtime events okay plus we have run chart production Pareto run note schedule and then we have the individual custom process date on the plant floor here including pivoting by job job jacket okay so all the data that I'm seeing here is a is an extension of the core mes system but it's pivoted on their job jacket system all right this is another view they had it they had a second custom view where what they wanted to do was look at that process data that they had learned about when we analyzed the data based on job jacket if we go back here when they looked at this process data here what they decided was well we want to we want to collect all of our this process data not in that database on the machine anymore what we want to do is we want to collect that in a historian an Enterprise historian at the site and so we installed Canary and we took the values that we were plotting that the machine had already been plotting in a database we started plotting them in a canary historian and then showing those process data points in the lower right hand corner okay so that was a a step three of the progression right also they wanted mobile they wanted their operators their supervisors they wanted everyone to be able to access this data mobile whatever also they wanted mobile so they wanted to be able to access all this data on iPads on cell phones they want to be able to access it from home they want to be able to access it from the pump plant floor so what we're looking at here is the same concept OE upper right hand corner order information upper left hand corner all the downtime events here and all of the data that we're seeing here is based on the active order which is tied directly to the job jacket which ties them directly to their Homebrew Erp system and when it was all said and done I want to come back here that first integration the first integration that got us to this initial Point here with this uh view into uh oee and job jacket status with that scheduler with that scheduler board and with that job jacket there based on this architecture right here that initial delivery was just in the proof of concept on one machine and the customer didn't pay anything for it that was a that was a a free proof of concept that I paid for so that we could prove the viability of doing this that hey instead of spending the eight hundred thousand dollars that you've been quoted on your manufacturing execution system why don't you just why don't we do this give me access to this machine just this one asset let us show you how you should do it you should build your mes system don't don't make the mistake everyone else is making and try to buy off the shelf and then realize the limitations give us access to your machine we'll build it for you and I'll do it for free okay two caveats number one we do whatever we want you have no say in what we deliver we're going to show you what's possible okay number two if you like it you buy it and you do the rest of the facility or we just take it out all said and done everything that you just saw here was all done in about 12 weeks start to finish including integration of every asset so every asset in terms of data integration from the plant floor was integrated but we only did manufacturing execution job jacket scheduling and unification on one asset which was a big 25 million dollar asset and the focus was focus on a high value return at the end of the day once the organization looked at that integration and they said we want the whole thing and later on we continue to iterate we built their art management system we built a manufacturing execution plus ink management you name it the entire organization the entire organization completely operates from through one single pane of glass that is quadrants core mes job jacket management scheduling ink management art management CRM Erp okay and the one La the last thing that we did about two years in was uh order entry so all the orders that create the job the job jacket is was all fully digitized as well and all most of that was converted from an Excel spreadsheet had this client not made this decision they would have ultimately had to make this decision a couple years down the road but they would have made the mistake that most people make which is they spend 500 to 800 000 or a million dollars on an off-the-shelf solution that only gets them 60 to 70 percent of what they want and makes them choose between that which already makes them competitive in the market the the uni the unique elements of their business they have to choose between that or or um getting a hundred percent of somebody else's solution that is making my business fit into someone else's platform okay then this is the reason that people end up building mes all right so with that I'm going to answer some questions from Discord here in a second but whether we should we include those questions here or whether they're separate videos right now um like subscribe comment down below yada yada yada and I'll see you in the next one