MES Saving Lives?

World of agriculture as an industry is a new world to me who has spent most of my life dealing with finance and energy sectors. 

The fact that we still have not and probably will never be able to defeat insects and even keep them from eating our food is blowing my mind. We think we've conquered the nature by industrialization, but at the end of the day we seem hopeless against the weather, insects, bacteria and fungus. 

While humans dying of hunger in Africa, we can't keep them from claiming our grain even using best technology we have and thousands of different poisons we have in market. 

Fighting them makes grain transportation a costly challenging operation. Price of grain inside Australia can vary a lot simply depending on where you buy it. 

MES systems can assist efficiency of pest control and reduce cost of pest control operations. They can also help make cheaper logistic plans and prevent human mistakes in planning by providing correct data. 

An MES system if implemented completely can definitely reduce grain loss in 'Farm to Fork' process and reduce cost of food for humans.

While we reach limits of our industrialization and it becomes harder for us to make more efficient trucks, trains and ships or more effective chemicals that insects won't get resistant to it, role of IT becomes more important. 

Enterprise systems currently in grain production and handling industries tend to only focus on sales, accounting and inventory management. Equipment are usually operated independently using either PLCs or even more basic control panels with push buttons. There is a long gap to be filled between these two layers to enable a smart handling of grain that can lead to less costs. 

I'll try to elaborate more on this as I go through the project I'm doing at work.

The idea that my work may help reduce hunger in world is very exciting

A question I had to ask myself today was if a POS system or a Parcel tracking system can be considered an MES system or not. I know that naming does not matter, but we've been telling people in industries that the system that integrates ERP systems and operations systems is called MES and have pictured this heavenly world for them were some planning or order in ERP translates into automatic operations down in filed level.

If you are a logistic company and you get orders for moving bulk material which then gets executed by your truck drivers and equipment operator, and then you feel like you need some system which translates these orders into individual truck/equipment operations that can be executed automatically and execution results can be recorded against original order then are you talking about an MES system? Should you approach the most well-known MES solution provider and define that as a project for them?
Or are you talking about the same old custom software that runs your business?

I've started working on a massive MES project that involves hundreds of sites and a big SAP system as ERP.
While we were trying to identify business drives and project objectives the customer pointed out that "Having an MES would be the only way to give our large organization competitive edge over small businesses".
Currently every few site in this organization operates very similar to a small business. Of course this makes the organization very agile and flexible but at the same time not better than any small business competing with them.
If they can link their SAP to order executions in Sites, then potentially an order from customer can be fulfilled with resources available in any of sites. This should help them

1. Have lower quotes
2. Full fill orders that single small business can't
3. Provide equivalent or better flexibility to customer to edit orders

 This is exciting to me, as this is probably the first project for me where MES is a necessity to survive. At the same time it also mean unprecedented stress.   

I'm using PowerShell more and more as an efficient MES Engineering tool recently and find it very convenient compared to writing codes in C# or VB Scripts. I've started to believe that PowerShell should go to our standard MES Engineer technical interview questions.
Ease of work with XML files, SQL Databases and Excel spreadsheets along with ability to write C# codes whenever required is increasing efficiency in MES mass configuration tasks.
Also the fact that windows have PowerShell pre-installed means I won't need to compile .exe and copy across to my server which is sometimes time-wasting with all security policies in place.
In slow Remote Desktop connections, the "less ceremony, more necessity" approach of PowerShell reveals it's value
I've already started collecting my personal arsenal of PowerShell cmdlets in Evernote and have Evernote on mobile devices and tablets installed. Shortness of PowerShell scripts means re-typing them won't be too much in case I can't copy&paste (e.g. having clipboard disabled on Citrix environments or being on a customer laptop not connected to any network or simply messed up clip-board in nested RDP sessions)

I've been designing and implementing MES solutions using Ampla pacakge by Schneider Electric for more than two years.
Ampla is a product originally developed by developers in Citect before acquisition of Citect by Schneider Electric. The main idea behind Ampla has been progressive creation of records from historical data such as a weightometer or status tags and then add user edit these records and do ad-hoc charting with them.
of course this is an extreme simplification of current version of product, but that main original concept almost has been maintained through every new feature or module later added to the original product.
In a very simple Ampla system that records production of a plant, records are created every hour which will contain total tonnes produced in that hour and each record will have a field that will capture the Crew operating the plant in that hour.
Later users can confirm and edit these records and create an ad-hoc on the fly bar of production grouped by each Crew for a period of time.

 

I can write pages about how Ampla has tried creation of these records and reporting based on them easier.
The Question I would like to ask is, how comman this pattern is in other MES products? Is this a dominant design for all MES softwares trying to do similar task?

 

Whoever that stores the historical data for a process, will have the power to dictate the type of analysis and reporting that would be available based on that data. Yet, many vendors seem to ignore the importance of historians in their product stack and offering. I have a feeling that this is going to cost them a lot in their competition.