MES for SMEs

Introduction

The environment for SME manufacturers in the UK has become increasingly difficult over the past decade. Rising energy and operating costs have eaten into margins. Increased global competition, trade friction and a lack of automation/digitalisation adoption has seen the UK fall outside of the global manufacturing output top 10.

Digital technologies and automation could provide a lever to counteract this negative trend. 50% of UK manufacturers cite adopting new technologies as a key strategic opportunity, with a focus on digital technologies. However, the industry regularly reports cybersecurity concerns, skills shortages and integration with legacy systems as major blockers to adoption.

Digital technologies are about bringing transparency and consistency to manufacturing processes. The transparency tells manufacturers where to focus their resources to get the biggest productivity gains for the lowest cost. The consistency ensures the process changes made to exploit those productivity gains persist in practice. This feedback loop of optimisation is key to improving the outlook for UK manufacturing. Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are the backbone of these digital improvements.

With approximately 90% of manufacturing in the UK provided by SMEs, it is paramount to bring technological advancements for operational efficiency to smaller businesses. Unfortunately, the cited barriers to adoption are often hardest to overcome for small manufacturers. What follows is what we think needs to be done to make these technologies accessible.

Affordable and Quick Installation

Often the biggest hurdle that SMEs encounter is the first one. Installation costs can be in the £10,000+ range, leaving significant sunk investment before any productivity improvements are visible.

However, this only accounts for half of the problem. Enterprise MES is often complex and time consuming to configure. Significant manufacturing support resources can be spent in setup, integration and process change. This can cause a sunk cost fallacy where the effort invested leads to adoption of a system not fit for purpose; or a lot of wasted time.

Simple Design

Often modern enterprise systems advertise high configurability and deep feature sets as key benefits. Whilst configuration is becoming more important as customers demand higher product variation, it cannot come at the cost of an opaque manufacturing control system.

Large manufacturers often have dedicated teams of experts to manage MES configuration, generate master data and deal with process deviations. SME manufacturers cannot afford to operate such teams, particularly when the cost of gaining this expertise is high.

Digital systems should be intuitive to operate without a convoluted manual to accompany them. Instead of fighting with a system to configure a manufacturing process, SMEs need MES to act as an extension of their existing production processes.

Invisible Infrastructure

Good digital systems should form part of the core processes of a manufacturing site. Whilst this brings huge productivity and efficiency gains, it can add a critical point of failure that can be very costly for SMEs.

Installation costs are often high because robust manufacturing software requires complex IT infrastructure. Expertise is required to set up and maintain this infrastructure, leading to large additional costs outside of software license fees. Again, SMEs often cannot afford the investment to operate on-premise IT.

Open Interfaces

Often enterprise manufacturing systems lock customer data behind confusing data schemas with limited publicly available support information. This forces manufacturers' processes to fit the rigid limits of the MES and hampers the value they can derive from the rich data digital manufacturing can provide.

These problems have only become more prevalent with the advent of AI, where restricted digital interfaces drastically limit the insights it can provide. SME manufacturers could use AI to make custom dashboards and control interfaces that are highly fit for purpose at low cost; but inflexible digital systems make this difficult.

Closing thoughts

SME manufacturers are an important backbone of the UK economy that have faced many headwinds over the last decade. Energy cost in particular is making efficiency their most important task.

Digital manufacturing technologies have the ability to provide controls and tangible information to help make processes leaner, faster and more flexible. We need to place these tools in the hands of SMEs now more than ever to ensure they can thrive in an increasingly uncertain and competitive environment.

Addressing the barriers of slow implementation, complex design, costly infrastructure and restrictive interfaces will go a long way to pursuing this goal. Whilst all engineering requires compromise, we believe that there are readily available technical solutions to these problems.