Everyone in manufacturing companies understands that they need an ERP system. Only a few try to get by with a simple economic system, and it’s been a long time since anyone handled accounting on paper or in Excel. Everyone recognizes that ERP saves labor, minimizes errors, provides real-time data, and automates key operational processes. No one can even imagine it being any different.
And that’s when a question comes up that I don’t have a reasonable answer to. Why are there so few manufacturing companies that don’t manage their core business, MANUFACTURING, as well or better than the regular corporate operation?
Yes, a lot of companies use manufacturing modules of their ERP systems, but they do not have on-line data from machines, they cannot manage production on-line, they do not allow detailed capacity planning, they do not know most of the user scenarios that a quality MES like MES PHARIS normally solves (see MES PHARIS user scenarios).
This is partly due to the misleading claims of ERP solution salespeople, who often assert that their manufacturing module can handle it. It cannot—not even halfway. Ignorance is no excuse! But that is not the answer; misleading claims are all around us.
When we see an attempt to make progress somewhere, the effort is often limited to implementing a cheap and simple solution for data collection and evaluation. Which is neither MES nor Industry 4.0, and certainly not online production management. The potential to increase production efficiency is very limited with such a solution. So there is no answer either, a half-assed solution simply does not make sense in most cases.
However, we also see the opposite examples. A few of our customers manage with a simple economic system (without ERP) but have chosen MES PHARIS for production management. With limited resources, they invested their time and money in improving the efficiency of their core activity—MANUFACTURING—rather than in ERP.
We encounter daily the difficulty of understanding that a high-quality MES more than pays for itself and is the best possible investment in manufacturing and the company as a whole.
Is this the answer to the question posed above?
It’s not. It’s a solution.
Tomáš Hradský
CEO
PHARIS, s.r.o.
