Benefits of an open approach to manufacturing execution system modernization

At the last Industrial Transformation Asia Pacific (ITAP) tradeshow in Singapore, I ran an in-person Factory Futures workshop with over 130 attendees.One of the audience chosen topics was Manufacturing Execution System (MES) implementation and modernization as a result of increased containerization, microservices architectures, and other proven IT concepts  making their way into the operational technology (OT) space.

The MES market is a vibrant territory, with many incumbent players competing with start-ups and scale-ups. This is partly due to the fact that modern cloud-native and edge architectures, supported by hybrid and multi-cloud platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift, provide increased deployment flexibility.  Red Hat OpenShift can run on the public cloud, on-premises, virtualised, and on bare-metal. It increases resilience through Kubernetes-based container orchestration, including features like automated restarts of a failing container. OpenShift allows customers to reuse existing skills across data-center, cloud and edge deployment, developing and applying operations best-practices to streamline the entire application lifecycle for the most critical core manufacturing applications such as SCADA, MES, Data Management, and AI workloads.

Workshop agenda

The workshop ran for 3 hours. The agenda followed a specific structure with lots of hands-on and interactive activities. Important components included ice-breakers, discussing success criteria, and associated challenges. At the end, each group presented their findings back to the room so that all attendees could learn from, and ask questions about, the topics that had been workshopped.

Goals and success criteria

The first step of the workshop was to identify the goals and success criteria and prioritize them.

Figure2: Workshop participants defining what success looks like for MES modernisation initiatives

The top goals and success criteria identified were:

• Real-time data monitoring (4 votes)
• Streamline manufacturing (4 votes)
• Shopfloor acceptance (4 votes)
• Easy Deployment (3 votes)
• Satisfied user/client (3 votes)
• Ready for Audit (2 votes)
• Reduce costs (1 vote)
• Elimination of manual processes
• Improve product quality
• Enable traceability

Challenges

In the challenges section of the workshop, participants were asked to list the top challenges when trying to reach their identified goals. The top challenges for MES modernization were identified as:

• Human issues , change resistance,  change management (7 votes)
• Demanding client expectations and unreasonable timeline expectations (4 votes)
• The implementation itself (4 votes)
• Understanding MES technology (3 votes)
• Adapting to different customer environments (2 votes)
• Extensive integration required, which has security implications (2 votes)
• Changing user requirements (2 votes)
• Getting accurate process timings
• Lack of unified protocols

Workshopping a solution

During the solutioning part of the workshop, the working groups were asked to consider the goals and  current challenges, and to formulate a plan to maximize chances of success.

One group opted for a high-level approach with a stakeholder focus, to address specific challenges that hindered goal attainment.

Interestingly, it's often assumed that you have a competently resourced project and implementation team at your disposal. Realizing this assumption made the group all the more aware of how important it was to develop a plan early, and to list everything required, down to the last detail. Furthermore, your project needs top level support (C-level buy-in was listed as one of the initial requirements for a solution) to have the priorities of supporting subject matter experts (SME) who are not directly part of the program delivery team. The business as usual (BAU) tasks should not override program delivery work.

Workshop conclusions

The working group consisting of industry analysts and managing directors of MES implementation companies had a great focus on "making it happen" with regard to implementation and change management. Having worked on large scale ERP migrations, I can attest that change management is a key component. What I have found over time is that Gantt-charts and top-down waterfall management processes give a feeling of control only at the start of a large program. After a project is under way, it's vital to earn people's support and buy-in, and to address change-resistance and get feedback about new processes and functionality.

Enterprise commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications are often configuration-driven. Iteration-based development can pose a challenge because parts of previous iterations may need to be changed after successful unit and integration testing cycles. That’s why deployment and configuration automation in a configuration-as-code style is vital to successfully deliver an MES modernization project.

How Red Hat can help

To address culture and change management, you need to be aware that Gantt-charts and project plans tend to boost confidence only during the initial planning and kick-off phases of a large program of work. It's rare that all work items go to plan. Project teams typically face pressure for no other reason than the fact that the estimates during the planning phase were based on limited knowledge, or they were simply incorrect.

That’s where Red Hat’s transformation and change management approach differs. Red Hat employs "open" practices as described in the open practice library. These are team-based practices for any problem space, and they're generally divided into different categories of exercises:

• Foundational
• Discovery
• Decision making
• Delivery

There's a multitude of different knowledge sharing, solutioning, and decision-making practices that can help iteratively and continuously improve your decisions based on the latest information. It also places power, through voting, into the hands of the team, eliminating the common HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion) syndrome.

Configuration as code

Heavy configuration changes is another characteristic of larger COTS-based transformation programs. This is where it becomes vital to have technology at hand that allows to continuously apply and test the latest configuration changes to a system instance for development, integration, user-acceptance testing, and production. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows for the provisioning and configuration of the core COTS application, the underlying infrastructure (network, compute, storage), general setup procedures, and more. For an MES implementation, this means it takes only the click of a button to test  new instances, new configurations, and deployment of existing and new integrations with other systems. From a day 2 operations perspective, this also helps avoid configuration drift creating security and compliance issues.

For MES vendors

If you are an incumbent MES vendor who wants to modernize your current offering or a scale-up/start-up who wants to improve your customer experience, then our field CTO team, in collaboration with our partner engineering team, are ready to explore the best way to jointly co-engineer the evolution of your offering.

Call to action

New technologies and approaches get adopted across different industries at different speeds. It's now time for manufacturing players to evaluate proven approaches that the industry can benefit from. These benefits can range from a higher speed of change, improved resilience, change control and stability to reduced cost of change.

Red Hat has a proven track record of addressing organizational culture alignment and effectively managing change. Our expertise in guiding enterprises through complex transformations makes Red Hat a reliable partner for organizations embarking on this journey. By leveraging Red Hat's extensive experience, your business can streamline deployments, reduce risks, and enhance overall system reliability. With these strengths, Red Hat can play a crucial role in supporting your organization through your digital transformation initiatives.

The CTO office, as part of global engineering, is ready to assist our partners and customers to address the latest leading edge engineering challenges through collaborative co-engineering.

Find out more about the workshop on.