MES Investment and ROI
How to build a solid business case
Manufacturing Execution System (MES) applications were first introduced in the semiconductor industry during the 80s. The semiconductor industry is very capital intensive and its manufacturing processes are very complex.
Even though the hardware costs have decreased by several orders of magnitude since the first MES systems were implemented, the investment required for an MES system implementation can still be significant. Therefore, it’s necessary to build a strong business case to justify the project.
A detailed ROI analysis requires identifying all benefits gained and costs incurred due to the MES implementation.
| The benefits |
MES benefits can be grouped in four categories: Quality, Productivity, Regulatory compliance and Agility.
An improvement in performance indicators for each category will generate a benefit for which the value can be calculated with some degree of accuracy (click on each category to view details). All benefits are cumulative (and hence recurring) once the MES is implemented.
Given the environment today with growing global competition in terms of innovation, cost and time to market (given by short product cycles) as well as with increasing regulatory demands, the answer to the question “can you afford not to invest in an MES?” is turning into a clear “No”.
White Paper:
Affordable MES. Performance and Scalability for Time-Critical Industry Environments.
by Critical Manufacturing
When selecting a system for applications that can potentially expand, manufacturers need assurance that their system can cope with all flow changes, automation levels, complexity or volume growth.
Critical Manufacturing conducted studies using hardware typical of that found in a working factory to prove MES performance and scalability.
Multiple test clients were programmed to perform a combination of a specified transaction set. To capture the number of sustained transactions, testers varied the number of application servers from one to four and measured the API transactional writes to each.
New performance benchmark tests show that even on relatively inexpensive standard hardware, Critical Manufacturing MES can manage well over 400 transactions per second. These tests also show that adding application servers delivers linear performance improvements, indicating that and further increases in performance are available by adding application servers and by scaling up the database server.
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