Case Study
Comprehensive Cloud MES Dramatically Lowers Implementation Costs and Risk
The Challenge
A growing industrial systems company evaluating potential MES solutions found on-premise deployment would incur high up-front costs and take up to a year to implement. This company’s product is complex, involving intricate subassemblies that require advanced processing at multiple plant locations. To accommodate growth and new production lines, they needed a flexible, easy-to-install MES that would enhance visibility across plants. The operations team began the evaluation process by reviewing on-premise solutions but excluded them based on:
- Implementation cost estimates exceeded $1 million and require at least one year of configuration and customization work.
- Ongoing maintenance would also involve substantial recurring costs. The IT team would have to be called for each change or realignment.
- The high levels of expenditure and risk would require months of product evaluations before deployment could begin.
Why 42Q
After an extensive search, the company discovered 42Q’s comprehensive, cloud MES solution. They discovered 42Q would eliminate many of the costs and risks associated with on-premise solutions. With 42Q, upfront costs are eliminated. Also, there was no need for extensive IT resources to acquire and install servers, databases licenses, and OS licenses in preparation for acquiring and installing the on-premise MES software itself. 42Q MES is based on a subscription model—the customer pays for what they use, easily scaling up or down. 42Q’s cloud solution eliminates IT infrastructure; new customers simply log in, configure, and use their new solution:
- Tracking, serialization, routing, work instructions, and paperless travelers can be configured and used the same day.
- 42Q takes care of machine-to-cloud integration; 42Q supports 150 machine protocols with no need to install local software.
- The customer can make changes to production lines without disrupting productivity.
- 42Q can be deployed on a few lines to perform proof of concept, adding or subtracting lines as needed. The customer never pays for functionality or scale they don’t need.
Results
The customer deployed 42Q’s solution on five production lines. The lines were up and running within eight weeks. At this point, the customer had only spent $50,000. They were able to use this initial deployment to prove the value and fit of the solution within their factory. The operations team and factory managers reported minimal disruption to productivity and were surprised by how simple it was to integrate life cycle management and enterprise resource planning systems.
See How Our Customers are
Transforming Their Businesses
Weir Minerals Reduces Manufacturing Lead Times by up to 30%
Weir Minerals, a part of the Weir Group plc, is a global market leader in the supply of engineered solutions and aftermarket products to the mining industry. Their customers require fast order fulfillment lead times, which are met by manufacturing products as quickly as possible within their 12 core manufacturing plants.
42Q Enables Production Readiness to Double the Volume at Comet’s Penang Facility
Comet’s facility in Penang, Malaysia needed to double the production volume of matching networks within a period of six months. While the manufacturing process itself could support the increase, the manual data collection process had reached the limits of its capability. The company needed to increase efficiency, improve quality, enhance traceability and wanted a single source of truth for all manufacturing data. They decided to implement a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and eliminate all spreadsheet and paper based processes. They also wanted the system to seamlessly integrate with their ERP system and a variety of manufacturing equipment.
Cloud MES Supports Sophisticated Automation in a High Speed, Highly-Regulated Manufacturing Environment
A global medical device manufacturer had been producing complex Class II medical devices for years, using 42Q as their MES. Now they faced the challenge of manufacturing high-volume Class III medical devices with complex, fully automated production lines. They feared that implementing advanced, high-volume automation using 42Q MES would require significant factory downtime. The new production lines required a high level of sophisticated automation and a manufacturing execution system that supported and seamlessly integrated with such systems.
Digital Factory Transformation with 35,000 Pieces of Manufacturing Equipment Connected in the Cloud
Sanmina manufactures 250 million products per year. More of a challenge is that there are over 200,000 different top-level assemblies produced each year for 700 different OEM customers with up to 20,000 forecast changes per week. The OEMs operate in diverse industries including telecommunications, enterprise computing & storage, industrial and clean technology. A significant amount of production is for medical, aerospace and automotive products with strict regulatory requirements. The existing on-premise MES required significant maintenance and upgrade effort from the IT and operations teams. It was also limited in its ability to manage supply chains beyond the walls of each factory, and was not well suited for factory automation and other IIoT initiatives.
Values & Capabilities
Delivered by Manufacturing Experts
Cloud-Based Technology
Subscription-Based Pricing
Rapid Implementation
Flexible Configuration
Multi-Plant Visibility
Track & Trace Genealogy
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