Flexibility And Efficiency In Industrial Automation

By Jari Åberg, Elomatic

Automation in production and industrial environments can be interpreted as a multi-tiered structure where each level has its own specific tasks, characteristics and place. The highest level of information management concerns Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, under which there are Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and actual production process management systems, i.e. Distributed Control Systems (DCS). The entire structure can and should be built to be €flexible so that it can be supplemented, if required, according to changing production requirements.

MES software and applications have been developed to supplement ERP systems and act in between ERP systems and process automation applications. For an automation system to operate optimally it is essential that data is able to flow smoothly and predictably from one system to another.