Geoff Tripp is a founding director of company Gemba Solutions, the product of a management buy-out in the year 2000 that saw Geoff and fellow staff members depart from the parent company with foundation product CATS MES (Manufacturing Execution System.)

The name Gemba is taken from "Gemba Kaizen", a Japanese philosophy promoting continual improvement in the workplace. "Gemba" means the "real place" - the place where the action is - where a real difference can be made. Aptly, according to Geoff, the concept lies at the very heart of MES and a fundamental truth that would appear to have escaped a lot of people's attention. 

In Geoff's own words: "Technologies that focus on the top end of the enterprise system will never truly get off the ground if there is a lack of investment in the shop floor system, the engine room of any manufacturing company, and the place where the real profits can be made if it can be made to operate to maximum efficiency."

MES defined

He elaborates further with a simple analogy: "Just as a monitor on your wrist can tell you how far and how well your body is jogging, so can a MES system allow you to look and see how your manufacturing plant is working."

In practice it's a little more complicated than that (but you knew that already right?) and Geoff acknowledges that it's taken a while for many to cotton on to the true scope of MES, simply because it can encompass, or more precisely "knit together", many other component areas, such as SFDC (shop floor data collection), human resource tracking and finite scheduling to name just three. 

In one of his white papers on the subject Geoff defines the concept of MES and what it can deliver: "In any manufacturing or process company, operations and processes will exist that you do not get the maximum utilisation and efficiency from. You probably do not have a set of standards to measure them against and do not have the facilities to monitor nor correlate information. A MES system provides the tools to achieve this in a structured manor. MES systems are able to gather and coordinate the operations of a plant and provide measurable information."

Measurable information

Measurable information is the key factor here. Geoff is openly critical of the struggle that UK and even worldwide manufacturing has in putting performance measurements in place. Furthermore he makes no secret of the fact that the lack of technology on the shop floor is often nothing short of criminal, particularly when compared with the multimillion expenditure levels made at the top floor enterprise level. The shop floor is the real poor relation here, the reasons for which, according to Geoff, appear to be two-fold.

Firstly, most existing shop floor technology is bespoke or custom designed, making information sharing with other systems problematic. Thus paper-based systems still abound and manual data input tends to be the norm. Secondly, traditional IT skills on the shop floor are different. They revolve around dealing with real time plant information, but just how much of this information is fed back to top floor planning functions is highly debatable. Just think - a multi million pound ERP system linked to finite planning but using figures that bare little resemblance to the true figures from the shop floor. Unthinkable? Go figure.

However, technology has moved on. Industry has invested in the automation of its major processes, introducing PLC and RTU technologies to most plants and installing local and wide area networks through which process data can be centralised to a common SCADA or telemetry system.

Many of today's SCADA and telemetry systems have also embraced IT office technology, allowing shared access to gathered plant information, and information derived within SCADA making it more specific to the operation of the plant.

Information explosion

It is this "information explosion on the shop floor," as Geoff called it, that means a MES application can be simply connected to the existing plant-based SCADA system, gathering key measurement information from the production line or process, and storing that information in an open database such as Microsoft SQL or Oracle. Stored information can then be interrogated and analysed and information generated using commercial analysis tools such as Excel and Crystal Reports.

Now we are talking the same language as the top floor and it is this ability to deliver flexible management information in a simple and modular manner that tends to elevate the need, collation and implementation of data produced by an MES system over that of a traditional SCADA system, which Geoff observes often sit in the background, generating alarms whilst most of the time being ignored.

But to what questions does MES data offer answers and against what standards is the data analysed?

In witnessing a shift away from shop floor SCADA systems, Geoff sees a move towards MES systems that target Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) and Overall Plant/People Efficiency (OPE), systems designed to measure the performance of either individual pieces of equipment or combined plants against a set of defined targets.

Calculating OEE

Now here's the math.

OEE is a calculation based on the ratio of three key parameters: Availability x Performance x Quality. Within these parameters are further calculations based on different factors: Availability = Operating Time / Planned Production Time; Performance = (Ideal Cycle Time x Pieces Produced) / Operating Time; Quality = Good Pieces / Pieces Produced. In fact, solutions such as Gemba's own CATS allow users to define even more additions to these standard calculations, such as relationships to products, shifts and people, thus building their own business rules and expanding the effectiveness of the resultant information.

Every plant and manufacturing process is different. Worldwide accepted levels for the average OEE score in manufacturing plants is between 45%-60%. A world-class level for manufacturing should be targeted at 85% or better. However, so confident is Geoff that an understanding and adoption of the OEE benchmark is a key enabler for MES, Gemba will be launching their own low cost OEE-based MES component next month. They hope the launch of OEE Impact will increasingly galvanise an already simmering MES market by lowering the entry cost and broadening the appeal of such a system.

So what type of questions does MES answer?

Geoff provides many examples in his white paper such as: How much does your plant cost you to run and how efficient is it really? Where are the hot spots? How much does each area of plant cost to run and how does this vary with different products and shifts? Does the way in which certain operators control the plant achieve a greater level of efficiency, requiring less energy, less chemicals, less support / man power? 

Crucial answers

Pretty critical stuff I'm sure you'll agree.

Additionally Geoff's paper points out that MES solutions where human resource is also considered, allows comparisons of efficiency to be made from person to person and shift to shift. By analysing the effect of adverse conditions on quality and relating this to the operational staff, an understanding of individual operator's knowledge of the process will be gained. Where high performers are identified their skills can be drawn on to provide training information, expanding the knowledge and experience of others.

This may all sound a bit Big Brother-ish (Geoff's own words) but in his experience, discoveries often reflect anywhere but the actual plant workers. 

He relates his own experience of being asked by a client to explain to 300 straight-talking women on a shop floor that they were all going to be monitored by CATS and that analysis data would be shared with everyone and any learnings acted upon. Geoff initially wanted to refuse this task, mumbling words like "sometimes no amount of money is enough to face that sort of audience" (refreshing or cowardly Geoff?)

Nevertheless, he did it and quickly discovered that the workforce had already proved more astute at spotting that particular plant's "pinch point" - a machine that they had been complaining about for some time - and when the figures came in and the inefficiency chips were down, management had no choice but to invest in a new machine.

Change management

So ultimately MES can be a bit of a scary gig?

Geoff has seen grown men cry at the thought of presenting actual OEE figures to management because they were so different from pre MES figures. "An OEE reality check" Geoff calls it, but with an upside as well as a downside. The downside being what was thought to be 60-70% OEE was really only 20-30%, the upside being the huge scope for improvement!

For reasons such as these, MES is not immune from change management issues that impact on most new technology adoption. It's quite frustrating for Geoff and his team to see the under utilisation of some installed MES systems because of fear of the unknown or in certain cases not so much the "unknown" as the "known". Now Gemba are building tools to help MES change management issues - checks to ensure that reports both circulate and prompt next step improvements. 
 
And it seems to be working. Feedback from Gemba clients has confirmed that being able to easily analyse production parameters such as downtime events, human resource loading & scheduling, line speeds and product throughput, efficiency improvements of up to 30% have been achieved in as little as 12 months as production/process pinch points and downtime problem areas are identified and addressed.

However, Geoff still estimates that the penetration in the UK of companies that have implemented a single component of MES is only 10% and that companies who have implemented MES with both OEE and HR modules are very rare. Still, reminding Geoff of the upside - there is plenty of potential out there!

Gemba believes the trick with MES adoption is breaking it up into manageable chunks, hence their new OEE product, with OEE acting as a critical "best practice style" module to set and unite standards of performance measurement. You see Gemba already knows that MES is suitable for many manufacturing organisations, albeit every plant is different. But the key question they pose is: are you as an organisation suitable for MES?

My thanks once again to Geoff Tripp of Gemba Solutions for his interest, advice and input to this article.