Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Big Data in Manufacturing: Is the Emperor wearing clothes?

By Patrick Weber, MBA PMP, MESA Member

Today I attended LNS Research’s “Global State of MOM” webinar; quite a bit of good information that I’m still digesting (kudos to Matt Littlefield & company). There is a bit I find hard to swallow though – Big Data in manufacturing. Perhaps I’m just so far out of the loop on this that I’m just not comprehending the obvious, but I can’t see a real business case for Big Data in the manufacturing environment, nor can I see plants investing in the infrastructure required to support Big Data solutions.

Monday, October 27, 2014

13 Questions Reveal the Benefits of Manufacturing Execution Systems

By Conrad Leiva, International Board Member of MESA International and member of MESA’s Technical Committee

Doubting the potential benefits of a new Manufacturing Execution System (MES)? Perhaps you need to take another tour of your facility and interview people with some of these questions in hand. Here are seven key questions:

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Business Value and the HMI

By Patrick Weber, MESA International Technical and Education Committee member

This blog post may be sailing into stormy waters, but today I’m putting on my bean-counter hat and challenging conventional wisdom with regards to human-machine interfaces, or HMI for short. This post is somewhat in response to the LinkedIn article “Look at all them pretty pictures” by Gerhard Greeff of MESA International. (As a side note, if you are in the manufacturing automation industry and are not following Gerhard on LinkedIn, you are the poorer for it!) But my hope is that we can start a conversation about the true business value of graphical user interfaces in today’s manufacturing environment.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Look at all them pretty pictures


By Gerhard Greeff, MES/MOM Proponent and Facilitator, MESA GEP Contributor and Trainer, Chairman - MESA Southern Africa.
With Dr Kobus van der Merwe


The increased graphical abilities of software resulted in automation vendors developing increasingly advanced graphics capabilities in their products. Users were quick to adopt and use the “pretty pictures”. SCADA/HMI graphics today can be identified by the colorful graphics, sometimes even in 3-D. Is this a good thing?




Wednesday, October 1, 2014

How to Build ROI Analysis for Manufacturing Systems

By Conrad Leiva, International Board Member of MESA International and member of MESA’s Technical Committee

The economy is recovering, but we are still facing a very conservative spending environment in our manufacturing organizations. Increased scrutiny on process improvement projects requiring investment, means that Return on Investment (ROI) analysis is not optional for information technology (IT) related projects.