Cloud Technology At The Forefront Of Manufacturing Space

Srivats Ramaswami, CTO, 42Q

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The Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) industry has been maturing rapidly over the past two decades. The term MES was first used by AMR Research (now part of Gartner) in the 1990s and was the heir apparent to the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) term first coined in the late 1980s. This era was well before many industry standards had been established and before Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) had taken root as the main IT backbone for most global manufacturing companies.

Because of market conditions, many early MES systems were closed, lacking the configurability and flexibility needed to adapt to changing business needs. This caused many early implementations to have a very high service to software ratio and often created an implementation process that seemed to have no end. For these reasons, MES earned a reputation early on as an expensive and risky endeavor that often did not deliver on initial ROI goals.

During the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the growth and consolidation in the ERP market was unprecedented. Market conditions gave rise to a number of vendors wishing to rebrand and differentiate themselves from the products of the past, namely MES. Many of these vendors took up the term Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and referred to their offerings as a MOM Solution or a MOM Platform.

Cloud Software and Solutions Become Mainstream

Over the past decade, there have been several notable examples of major software solutions being provided as cloud solutions. This includes offerings from Salesforce, Netsuite, Workday and others. These successes have helped bring the cloud to the forefront of enterprise discussions.