A diagnostic toolto evaluate manufacturing execution systems improvements from operational and financial viewpoints

The evaluation of the actual competitive advantages derived from the use of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) is a relevant topic to increase performances of manufacturing companies. Many qualitative studies are present in literature in order to underline the effectiveness of MES. Nevertheless no quantitative evaluations have been published or reported. Aim of the main study, realized in collaboration with Siemens Spa, was to design a framework to define and calculate economical and operational indicators about costs, revenues and efficiency. The framework, including a model of Key Performance Indicators organized through a hierarchical structure of 4 levels and 70 elements, has been defined through a study performed in two large companies that, recently, adopted MES system. Through a differential evaluation of KPI before and after implementation authors estimated MES impact end related benefits (the evaluation is just an estimation due to the low number of companies investigated but allowed the definition of an interesting KPI model). The collected data, in terms of KPI, related to benefits and improvements have been correlated in order to create explicit linear relationships between KPI and to evaluate ROI. The research starting point and the KPI model, the derived tool and its validation are explained and results derived from first trial applications are explained in this paper. Authors are working in extending the database of MES implementations and are going to use the KPI model to predict KPI values and ROI, before a MES implementation, by simulating expected values in different deployment stages.