February 18, 2010 - Manufacturing industry, in common with other industrial sectors, faces mounting challenges that require forward-thinking and strategic decisions. New investment is not the most urgent of these challenges. The crucial question today is how to optimize the efficiency of existing manufacturing systems. Companies are keenly aware of the need to improve the productivity of plant and machinery, however the actual dilemma is how to optimize the effectiveness of existing investment that has already gone into automation and IT-aided production management. Another major question is how high-tech solutions can be applied across entire production chains and used to link all processes.
Answers to these and other questions can be found at Digital Factory. An integral part of HANNOVER MESSE from 19-23 April 2010, this trade show puts the focus on Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).
MES Conference
The MES Conference, which made its debut in 2009, proved so popular that it appears in 2010 with an even more comprehensive thematic program. In cooperation with their partners VDI (Association of German Engineers), VDMA (German Engineering Federation) and MESA Europe (Manufacturing Enterprise Solution Association), the organizers of HANNOVER MESSE have decided to extend the scope of the program to embrace questions relating to personnel resources and general cost-cutting that are conventionally viewed as an issue for human resources management.
A panel discussion will allow full discussion of some controversial and interesting viewpoints.A series of lectures will demonstrate positive experiences with the application of MES software in actual industrial applications and explain its effects on quality management and the optimization of capacity utilization.
MES parameters
The long-awaited MES parameters will play a major role this year, not only forming a major topic at the MES Conference, but also emerging as a recurrent theme throughout the entire trade show. Once MES had become established as a distinct and separate area of IT within manufacturing, it was clear that DIN and the VDMA would seek to define standard quality and operating data for MES. The current list of 22 parameters defined by the VDMA (German Engineering Federation) in May 2009 were published in VDMA memorandum no. 66412 and have so far been requested 800 times by industry - a far bigger show of interest than the VDMA normally encounters for standardized parameters.
Vertical integration
The vertical integration of data from different operating areas again represents a keynote theme within the MES presentation, as it was in previous years. The ability to store and access data from development, logistics, warehousing, materials management and orders control on a single interface - for example, on a wireless device - is seen as central to improving production outcomes and hence competitiveness.