Chemicals Solutions, ERP for Operations

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was supposed to be the single solution for all the business application software that a company might need. For many manufacturing companies, ERP has delivered value, but not without drawbacks, including it's inability to support improvement initiatives within manufacturing operations. At their core, most ERP solutions are financial systems, built for employees working in a corporate office environment, rather than manufacturing systems built for the demands of the shop floor. Manufacturers today are in need of ERP systems that will support the entire business by providing new capabilities, new flexibility and support for the total vision of the company.

The good news is that there are ways to leverage ERP investments to achieve such benefits. Many manufacturing plants have relied on their employees to fill in the functional gaps left by ERP, through manual activities, paper-based tools, and PC based spreadsheets. However, it's possible to provide IT applications that help the plant operate while still working within the context of larger corporate initiatives. Using a Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to complement the ERP investment supports manufacturing operations by collecting and organizing the information from the plant floor and getting it into ERP. MES solutions are generally available as commercial off-the-shelf application software products, which, if integrated properly, embrace the ERP initiative and bridge the gap between the plants and the ERP system itself.

MES works with ERP to perform some critical functions jointly, and ERP extends these functions across the company. In order for ERP to effectively do its job, it needs timely, accurate, complete data. ERP is great at managing financials, purchasing, scheduling, and all of the business-critical functions needed to make the company more productive and help management teams make the critical decisions needed to be competitive. But without the data, it is incapable of providing all of its potential benefits. In order to effectively manage direct labor and materials, schedule production orders, and monitor quality with ERP, the company needs tight integration with the production floor, for which MES is the solution. Without this piece of the enterprise IT architecture, manufacturers often end up settling for much less that they expected from their ERP investments.

When MES systems are implemented and properly integrated with the company's ERP systems, both IT investments can deliver higher paybacks through synchronized business execution. EnteGreat has guided many of our clients through this integration process by first helping them to accurately articulate MES requirements, conduct MES product evaluations, and complete the definition and justification for projects. We help our clients define and justify their IT strategies and architectures, determine exactly what benefits they can deliver for the entire company, and identify the mechanisms that must be in enabled to produce those valuable results.

Learn More:

• Request a free CD copy of ERP for Manufacturing: Dead-end or Destination?, a webinar presentation by EnteGreat (Ed Sullivan) and SAP (Gerhard van Niekerk).
• Read MES: It Really is an Enterprise Application now! , an article by Tyson Foods' Director of Manufacturing Execution Systems and EnteGreat client, Jeff Stas. Published in Manufacturing IT Magazine, December 2003.
• Read Get More From Your ERP Investment, an article by EnteGreat, as published in Business Week's 2003 Annual Software Solutions edition.
• Read ERP to MES Integration: An Integral Key to an Effective Supply Chain, an white paper by EnteGreat.