Why We Insist on Developing Our Own MES

Why would a lean and smart-factory consulting firm write its own code and build its own product? In this article, I give the honest answer.

1. Who We Are

We are a team that spent years in industrial engineering at Fortune-500 foreign-owned factories, specializing in lean operations, and a team that “grew out of” lean production consulting. Our core members all come from IE backgrounds — process, efficiency improvement, shopfloor management, supply chain, new plant planning and overall operations — followed by many years of lean production and smart factory consulting.

The real problems on Chinese shopfloors — scheduling by experience, progress by chasing, data by manual reports, abnormalities by shouting — we did not read about them in books; we walked through them factory by factory.

Because of that origin, we understand the logic, functions, application and pitfalls of MES more intimately than most. In the smart-manufacturing landscape, ERP manages people, finance and materials, but it is MES that commands how man-machine-material-method-environment actually runs on the floor. MES is the foundation of the digital factory: without a solid base, digital twins, intelligent scheduling and IIoT are castles in the air. We have never wavered from this judgment.

2. We Have Seen Too Many “Unusable MES”

Over the years we have helped many enterprises deploy MES and observed many more that already had one. A pattern troubles us: many MES installations are either hard to use or fail to genuinely improve management capability.

Breaking it down, there are three typical failure modes.

Type one: the system is hard to use. Complex interfaces and tedious operations mean frontline workers would rather take notes on paper and backfill the system — the data is not “grown” but “fabricated”. Nobody owns such an MES beyond passing inspections.

Type two: the system does not reflect optimized processes. Many projects copy the existing processes into the software as-is, sometimes even hard-coding the chaos. The result: the company pays to digitize its past mess, with zero gain in management capability.

Type three: no process optimization or standardization before rollout. Processes unsorted, data undefined, standards unbuilt — straight to “go live”. Go-live day is the endpoint; the system becomes decoration.

In one sentence: either the system is unusable, or it never truly improved management. The root cause usually lies not in the software but in builders who don't understand factory operations, and companies that haven't clarified their own processes.

That is why we made the decision: develop a MES system with 100% independent intellectual property.

3. Our Confidence and Conviction

Our confidence comes from IE's fundamental methodology: decompose shopfloor problems into processes, operations and data, then express them in the language of software. Our conviction is plain: MES should carry not just “entry and reporting” but the optimized logic of processes, operations, scheduling and cost — products bound to routings and operations, so entering a part number schedules by routing, with scheduling and cost forming a natural closed loop.

We also keep reminding ourselves: however good the software, it cannot replace on-site improvement. If a client's processes are not yet straightened and standards not yet built, we first help them catch up on the lean homework before talking systems. In the wrong order, AI just puts a clever shell on a broken process.

4. Closing

Peers often ask: you are consultants — why invest so heavily in building your own MES? My answer: because we have seen too many companies waste money on “getting a system”, and because we believe Chinese manufacturers need not a piece of software but a deployable digital operations capability.

Lean first, then systems; systems serve lean, and AI empowers systems. That is the entire reason we insist on building our own MES — the plainest conviction of a practitioner with nearly thirty years of IE roots: make improvement real, and make the system solid. If your plant is considering MES, or struggling with an “unusable MES”, talk to us — the pits we have stepped in may be exactly the ones you are about to avoid.

Reposted from the Toutiao account 「精益智造践行者」 (Lean & Smart Manufacturing Practitioner).

Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7701283641040683560/