SimpleMES - Guide

Like most aspects of life, manufacturing requires a lot of paperwork to track what you build and how you build it. Most of your customers require inspection data, component usage and other production data. The traditional way to supply this was via paperwork shipped with the product.

Today, most customers require digital data delivered with the product. An MES will allow easier creation of much of this data for your customers.

Traceability is an important part of manufacturing. When a defective component lot from a supplier is used in a product, you need to know which orders or serial numbers used these components. This is critical for product recall scenarios.

By using the Assembly module features, you can decide what to collect when a component is assembled by an operator. This data can be quickly searched using the Component Report to find where a specific component lot was used. You can also review the components used on a specific order/LSN to help diagnose the source of component-related problems.

Beyond tracking what happens on the shop floor, you can also control the actions that are performed on your products. This is done by defining routings and bills of materials (BOMs) for your products. SimpleMES will help guide your operators to perform the steps in the right order and to assemble the components needed.

You can also control what actions a given user can perform. This is controlled by the security roles you can assign to you users.

The performance of your shop floor is critical to your success. It is important to find problems with the performance before it reduces you efficiency. The production log records the actual production time/results for the shop floor. This forms the basis for most reports that let you determine how well your shop floor is operating.

Many industries are regulated by the government. These regulations frequently control how you build, inspect and repair products. An MES can help you document how you comply with these regulations. In particular, the MES can track who and how the product is built. This is cornerstone of most regulations about manufactured products.

An MES can also help control how you build the products. Many regulations require you to have a documented production process. The MES product definitions such as routings and BOMs can form the core of this process documentation.

In almost all shop floors, you need to know exactly what is happening on the floor in real time. When using an MES, you can quickly find specific orders and determine their status. You can also monitor real-time performance and help identify performance issues early.

The data in SimpleMES forms the basis for a real-time status reporting. These are reports that give you the current status.

Tracking production costs is a key part of knowing if you are profitable or not. It is also needed to help you determine the price you charge your customers. Without knowing your costs, it is difficult to set an accurate price for your products.

SimpleMES does not support a costing module at this time. Instead, you can use the production log history to determine your costs. These costs come from these key areas:

SimpleMES gives you the data you can use to determine your costs in these areas. The key data source is the production log. You also can use the component history to determine the component usages for your shipped products.

Some common terms and fields are used throughout SimpleMES:

Most standard objects will have these typical fields:

There are a number of diagrams in these documents. We follow the given conventions for these diagrams. Some colors and shapes are used to flag specific types of elements:

Most modules have 3 main sets of documents:

The intent of the guide is to give you a general overview of feature, but not overwhelm you with details of the implementation. The reference documentation will explan most key fields, API calls and options. The guide generally has many links into the reference documentation.

The relationship between the guide and reference is shown below for the GUI Tags such as <ef:show> :

Dashboards are fairly complex. To manage this in the documents, we use the guide for concept introduction and sometime simple examples. The reference document will explain all of the activities, events and scan actions for the dashboard. Each module will have additional activities, events and scan actions. These will be documented in a similar way:

To avoid this, SimpleMES tries to reduce these up-front decisions to the minimum. We try to make everything optional, where possible. For example, in a traditional MES, each order would require a Product (Part Number) for the product to be built. SimpleMES makes this product optional.

This helps in a number of ways:

Of course, this means SimpleMES must be tested by our developers for both scenarios. This adds to the development tasks, but ultimately helps you. It also provide documented scenarios in which the order can be processed without a product.

This philosophy of 'Everything is Optional' is applied throughout SimpleMES, whenever possible. The automated tests cover the scenarios where the setting is empty and when a value is provided. You can use the more complex features as they are needed. An example of how a customer might start simple and expand is:

Each progressive level adds complexity, but also allows more control and tracking options. The customer chooses when to take on this complexity as they need it.

Along with the 'Everything is Optional' approach, SimpleMES tries to require very little setup to run. This means there are a number of default settings that make sense and can work in a wide range of scenarios.

For example, you can customize the dashboards to suite your shop floor needs. But you don’t have to understand this when you start working with SimpleMES. SimpleMES provides a few default dashboards that work with simple configurations. You can customize these as needed to provide the features important to you.

Another big simplification is to avoid pre-setup of GUI settings and such. In the case of lists, you don’t need to configure the order and size of the columns. You can directly modify those in the GUI. Those settings are saved by user and used the next time the list is displayed. This means less setup before you use the MES.

Customization of an MES is critical. Most shop floors operate differently. There is no one right way to build all products. This means you will need to customize the GUI and business logic of the MES to suit your needs.

SimpleMES provides a number of ways to customize the MES, using the Enterprise Framework customization features.

The key areas of customization are:

The custom fields allow you to add custom fields to existing core object (e.g. Order). This lets you use custom logic with these fields as needed.

The Flexible Fields support is similar, but targeted at specific data collection points such as Assembly and Defect Tracking. This allows you to define what the operator collects when assembling components or handling defects.

It is also possible to add logic to most core methods using scripting. This allows you to handling your custom needs without altering the core code.

Finally, the module structure allows you or a system integrator to combine core and custom business logic modules together as needed. This is how the Assembly and Defect Tracking modules add features to the main MES module.

Modern web-based applications are generally hosted by cloud service providers. SimpleMES is designed to be deployed in a number of ways:

The goal is to allow simple cloud hosting for smaller customers. Then allow more complex systems to be hosted by you on your chosen cloud system. Finally, large customers may prefer to deploy SimpleMES on an internal cloud server.

To make this possible, SimpleMES is built as a deployable WAR file or as a Docker image. These images are updated frequently, so you can receive updates as soon as you want them.

The development processes of SimpleMES follow a normal, modern development practice:

This means each feature is thought out and designed as end-user documentation before coding begins. Then automated tests are created before coding begins. Finally, the code is written until the automated tests pass.

This ensures that a feature is designed at a high level before coding. It also means that all supported scenarios have automated tests. This helps smooth updates to the application in the real world.

When issues (bugs) are found, then an automated test is created to reproduce the issue. Then the issue is fixed. This automated test is now part of the permanent tests used to verify the application. This means a given bug will never be re-introduced into application.