The relationship between ERP and MES is evolving. Why is integration necessary?

Since software has acquired strategic importance as a business evolution tool – capable of measuring business performance, economic growth, operational efficiency – the organization of work itself is undergoing progressive change.
Agile practices are evolving, such as collaboration with the customer and a quick and flexible response to change, which contribute to a significant increase in the impact of digital transformation on business performance.
DevOps practices are added, a software development methodology whose goal is to offer new levels of sharing and integration between developers and operations personnel, to accelerate the design, testing and release times of business application solutions both in traditional environments and in cloud environments, guaranteeing the quality and safety of the developed product.
It continues with the API – Application Programming Interface – an application which, through a standard method for querying and accessing data, exposes the functions of another application, allowing it to communicate and enabling the reuse of available services, which can thus be composed and decomposed according to different needs.
Finally, the adoption of a strategy to guarantee security through identity, thanks to contextual and behavioral analytics and predictive approaches to identify violations.

These practices have been made possible by the ability to implement the company’s ERP through MES solutions, systems that facilitate the integration itself from an operational point of view.

So why do companies implement ERP systems using the MES?

• Improvement of company performance: it is a tool that creates value by offering concrete advantages to the internal company organisation
• Work facilitation for employees: by simplifying procedures, it leads to an increase in employee productivity
• Regulatory compliance
• Exponential growth: it is always more advantageous to implement a new ERP system when the company is small or medium-sized, this guarantees the habit of using optimal tools for productivity and building a solid structure thanks to which to grow and expand.
• Launch of international business operations thanks to a recognized interface that can also be used by foreign teams or teams located throughout the territory
• Requirements for stakeholders: if a company receives funding or is acquired by another company, the key stakeholders can request specific accounting tools offered by the ERP to standardize operations and ensure transparency

MESs are used in both continuous manufacturing and discrete manufacturing industries to optimize processes and maintain competitiveness.
Thanks to them, we move from an organization that begins with planning and then moves on to execution, to an organization that is based on planning during construction, parallel to execution. Strategy that guarantees maximum efficiency, in a context where time is a fundamental critical factor.

The basis of this software solution is therefore the collection and interpretation of data, starting from the interconnection of business processes. And what is the data for? To create value, and it is this value that makes the difference. The data can be used in real time to optimize production activities, solving any machine stops, reducing waste, increasing speed but above all improving the quality of product processing.