What Are Manufacturing Execution Systems?
P.J. Jakovljevic - November 29, 2005

What Comprises a Manufacturing Execution System Anyway?

Plant execution software systems have many different scopes, forms, and formats and mean different things to different folks. Although plant execution software is used widely in a number of industries, they are rarely described similarly, and their functions are rarely identical. An execution system used at an electronics discrete manufacturing facility is similar only in concept to one used at a food processing plant, and these differ substantially from that used by a pharmaceutical or chemical manufacturer. Time and experience have led the most successful vendors to pursue a "narrow-and-deep" strategy, and to devote their software development to the industries they know best. Even still, the names given to the various components of the execution systems vary greatly among industries and even among companies within an industry—if not between plants within a company...