Monday, November 18, 2019

Improving Customer Trust in the Smart Manufacturing Supply Chain

By: Dave Noller & Conrad Leiva

The manufacturing and consumer market are getting more competitive every day with a lot of options for the buyer available on the shelf or just a few clicks away. Brand differentiation is important to remain top of mind for buying decisions. For example, in the food industry, more than 80% of food consumers consider the impact of how and where food was produced when making a purchase. Trends show that consumers want to know more than just the nutritional information - they want to know the food’s origin, when it was grown, and how. What are the demands in your industry? How is your company innovating to stay ahead of the curve?

This article focuses on examples from the food industry, but the lessons learned can be applied to supply chains in other industries. For example, the bar is rising for safety, quality and traceability in other markets like pharma, medical devices, automotive and aerospace. Companies are moving beyond regulatory compliance in these industries. They want to get ahead of customer demands and make sure their supply chain can meet these data and traceability requirements.

Monday, October 21, 2019

A Plant Is a Symphony of Challenges and Choices


By John Meulemeester, MESA Commercial Leader

I have visited literally hundreds of production plants, from producing radios, cars and bricks to soup and chemical ingredients. I can tell you, there is hardly such a thing as a “standard production line in a factory”. If you know one company that has an ‘identical’ production line in two plants, please let me know.

I compare this to music. Universally limited to only 12 notes… it creates an infinite number of “songs and symphonies”.

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

MESA Member Q&A: Chris Hamilton, Co-Chair of MESA’s Cybersecurity Working Group

By Shaunna Balady, Member, MESA International Marketing Committee


As part of our ‘MESA Proud’ campaign, we’re shining some light on various members who help this nonprofit continue to be an important network for IT education and collaboration in the Smart Manufacturing and MES/MOM space.

First up, we have Chris Hamilton, Co-Chair of MESA’s Cybersecurity Working Group. Chris shares an overview on what it’s like to be in the working group, why he is a MESA member and his personal hobbies.

Q: As Co-Chair of MESA’s Cybersecurity Working Group, what type of issues does the group seem to be focused on?
A: The group is focused on taking industry security standards like ISA-62443, SP 800-82, CIS CSC, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST Ver. 1.1, etc and making those accessible and understandable to all MESA members as related to cybersecurity issues in manufacturing and/or industrial systems. 
Additionally, the group has created a number of blog articles which address the topic of security in an effort to bring awareness, education, and knowledge sharing.
Further, the group is active in trying to provide guidance on dealing with end of extended support issues around Windows XP and Server 2003 and upcoming for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. View upcoming meeting dates to participate.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

4 Essential Steps for Success with the Artificial Intelligence of Things

By Jane Howell, MESA Americas Board Member

This blog is a MESA Member Point of View.


Some technologies are inevitably bound together. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are a perfect example of two technologies that complement each other and should be tightly connected.

The combination is AIoT (the artificial intelligence of things), and it already exists in our daily lives but we seldom recognize it. Think Google Maps, Netflix, Siri and Alexa, for example.

AIoT is creating new value for organizations across a broad spectrum of industries – from manufacturers and retailers, to energy, smart cities, health care, and beyond.

And more organizations are taking notice. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 80 percent of enterprise IoT projects will include an AI component, up from only 10 percent today.

So, how can you realize success with AIoT?

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

IIoT Platforms, Not All created Equal

This blog is a MESA Member Point of View

By Gerhard Greeff, MESA EMEA Board Member

In the past few years, solution providers have often been asked to assist in creating an Internet of Things (IoT) or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) strategy. Our answer has always been, and will continue to be…

What is the business problem to be solved or the outcome to be achieved?

Monday, August 12, 2019

Continuous Asset Optimization 4.0

By Dr. Ananth Seshan, Chairman of the MESA Continuous Asset Optimization Working Group

This blog is a MESA Member Point of View.

What does sub-optimal performance of your asset cost your business? Can you really afford to ignore the hidden, but ever-growing cost? 

Unplanned downtime is still one of the predominant costs in a manufacturing operation notwithstanding the advancements in predictive and condition-based maintenance. Even though the focus of proactive maintenance has been to: (a) catch the symptoms of failure early, (b) using past experience and some domain knowledge, infer the probable causes from the symptoms and, (c) taking proactive actions to prevent the failure, only limited success has been achieved from the previous generation predictive maintenance approaches. Why?

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Be an IoT Data Super Hero: Ingest, Understand, and Act to Accelerate Business Outcomes using the Cloud

By Jane Howell, MESA Americas Board Member

This blog is a MESA Member Point of View.

If you’re a data scientist, you know the pressure to help your business understand the signals hidden in the vast and diverse stream of IoT data.  Businesses need to decipher these signals so they can deliver critical outcomes to enhance the customer experience, improve equipment effectiveness, and drive operational excellence.

But if you’re using batch scoring and various techniques to analyze data at rest, you’re hamstrung by the need to stream, store, and then score the data.  Not only is it very time consuming, but it also delays your ability to make decisions in real time which hampers the business’ ability to accelerate performance.

What steps can you take to rapidly convert IoT data into valuable insights for your business?

Thursday, June 20, 2019

12 Benefits of Using Standards in the Design and Implementation of iMOM Projects

This blog is peer-reviewed by the MESA's Process Industries Working Group

By Stan DeVries, MESA member of the Process Industries Working Group

Download the supplemental guidebook: MESA Process Industries Guidebook: Adopting Integrated Manufacturing Operations Management (iMOM) in Oil & Gas and Petrochemical Industries, Leveraging Digital Technologies and Industry 4.0 Framework and join the public LinkedIn Group MESA iMOM for the Process Industries


In integrated Manufacturing Operations Management (iMOM), the ultimate goal of using software systems is to increase and sustain business benefits. In theory, this goal could be achieved by working with a single software vendor throughout the project lifecycle. In practice, though, single vendor approaches are not the best approach for the following reasons:

Monday, May 20, 2019

Behind The Scenes: MESA's Outstanding Contribution Winners

A big congratulations to MESA's 2019 Outstanding Contribution Award winners! We captured the awards at recent events on our World Tour.

These thought leaders help drive MESA programs like education, training, research and overall help important discussions happen between committees and professionals. Help celebrate these winners by sharing this blog post or the press release.

Friday, March 15, 2019

Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight – At the Manufacturer’s Shelf

By Conrad Leiva, Chair of MESA's Smart Manufacturing Working Group

Download ‘MESA/Gartner Business Value of MES Survey 17’ results.  |  This blog is a MESA Member Point of View

There are hidden treasures at the manufacturer’s shelf and we are not talking about the inventory shelf. We are talking in this article about the IT shelf of already owned software that is not being used. More specifically about the Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) or Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software the company purchased a few years back that hasn’t been deployed to its full capabilities.

Gartner has recently published some interesting results from a joint survey with MESA International — results that validate this premise. [1] Figure 1 below (Figure 4 in the report) shows that even though most companies have achieved the expected return on investment (ROI), they still believe that there is more value to capture with their MES.
Value from MES

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Slow Yet Steady Progress Towards Smart Manufacturing -- Will you be prepared?

By Conrad Leiva, Chair of MESA's Smart Manufacturing Working Group

This blog is MESA Peer Reviewed



The manufacturing industry continues to make progress towards the vision of a fourth industrial revolution—a  vision of revolutionary productivity increase. How? Through the the higher levels of automation, orchestration and optimization enabled by Smart Manufacturing’s higher levels of connectivity and data transparency from each resource, plant and partner in the new manufacturing ecosystem.

In the Figure 1 below, we compare results from 2017 survey data compiled by IndustryWeek and MESA International [1] to results from a 2018 poll running at MESA International’s website [2]. At first glance,  it might seem that the number of Smart Manufacturing projects implemented are going down, but that  decrease in percentage is explained by an increase in the percentage of companies planning and researching the topic and a decrease in the percentage of companies not doing anything.