Siemens Wins Top Award in MESA Smart Story for Manufacturing
MESA International, the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association, recently announced that Siemens has won its Smart Story Award contest, garnering the largest interest in their paper MES users face a critical choice: PLM or ERP, based on a case study from a leading manufacturer of engines for aerospace.
MESA hosts the Smart Story Award contest, which asks leading manufacturers and their partners for innovative stories about the smart use of manufacturing technology and intelligence. The MESA readership chooses the winners – the stories that garner the broadest readership.
The interest in the Siemens story reflects the challenge that many manufacturers are facing as they evolve to digital manufacturing enterprises. What should their approach be to architecting their systems – from enterprise planning and product design to shop-floor execution and control? The types of systems they choose should be guided by the requirements of their manufacturing processes – whether they are complex engineer-to-order processes, with multiple manufacturing orders coming from the PLM, or whether they are make-to-stock processes, where an ERP may be generating the manufacturing order. These pose different demands on the system that translates design into physical products on the shop floor, the manufacturing execution system (MES).
The winning Siemens’ paper explores the tradeoffs in architectural approaches, and the needs of the digital enterprise as product requirements evolve, as mechatronic products become more customized and cater to consumer preferences. A Siemens’ case study of an aerospace manufacturer details the approach of the PLM-MES architecture, and the transition this manufacturer made from an ERP-centric infrastructure. The results reveal why the requirements of this complex manufacturing process were uniquely met with the PLM-centric approach, and why the ERP-centric approach was breaking down.
Anticipating the evolution of product requirements, and considering the significant investment required to implement systems and the difficulty in replacing them, today’s manufacturing leaders are taking a hard look at how their MES systems are designed.
Join the webinar on February 13 (11.00 Eastern Time / 17.00 Central European Time) to hear from Siemens and other MESA Smart Story Award winners, and learn more about their stories live.
