Manufacturing Analytics

The MES captures downtime. SAP captures production orders. Nobody has connected them. So OEE is calculated at shift end by whoever remembers to fill in the form — and by the time the plant manager sees Monday's report, the week's production schedule is already locked. The data that should drive decisions is arriving three days after they were made.

Month-end scrap reports show you what you lost. They don't show you which machine, which shift, which operator, which material batch caused it. You can't act on aggregated scrap data — you can only wince at the number. The fix is granular tracking at the point of production, connected to the ERP batch records.

By the time a quality deviation surfaces in the SAP quality module, the batch has already shipped or the downstream impact has already cascaded. The SPC data exists in the quality system. The production parameters exist in the MES. Nobody has built the bridge that catches the pattern before it becomes a non-conformance.

Every plant has a production plan. Most have planned vs actual reporting — weekly, in a spreadsheet, presented in a meeting where everyone nods and moves on. The gap between plan and actual is accepted as normal. It isn't. It's a symptom of a scheduling system that isn't connected to real capacity data.