History of MES

The story

1. Today· Your shop

   Where it starts

   Somewhere in your shop right now, a job is moving. A traveler rides with it from the saw to the mill to inspection. Someone wrote down the hours. Someone else is asking where it is. The software built to answer that question has a name: the manufacturing execution system, or MES. This is the story of how the shop floor got its own software, and why so many shops still run on paper.

2. 1881 to 1911· Midvale Steel

   The route clerk

   The paperwork came before the software. In the early 1880s, Frederick Taylor began timing work at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia. In his 1903 paper, Shop Management, he moved planning off the floor and into an office. A route clerk laid out each job’s path from machine to machine. An instruction card said how to do each step and how long it should take. Workers sent back written returns every day. That is a traveler.

3. 1924· Western Electric

   Between two limits

   In May 1924, Walter Shewhart, an engineer at Western Electric, gave his boss a memo about a page long. A third of it was a drawing: measurements plotted between two limits. Inside the limits, leave the process alone. Outside them, something changed, so go find it. Shewhart showed that adjusting a machine after every bad part made the parts worse. Quality screens in MES software still draw his chart.

4. 1952· MIT, Cambridge

   Tape that runs a mill

   In 1952, MIT’s Servomechanisms Laboratory showed a milling machine that took its orders from punched paper tape. The idea came from John Parsons, a Michigan contractor who made helicopter rotor blades, and the Air Force paid for the work. For the first time, the steps to cut a part lived outside the machinist’s head. In the 1970s, small computers moved inside the controls. That is computer numerical control, or CNC.

5. 1959· Factory data collection

   Clocking the job

   Knowing what happened on the floor still meant reading handwriting. In 1959, IBM announced the 357, a data collection system for factories. A worker fed a badge and a job card into a station on the floor, and a clock added the time. The record went straight onto a punched card for the office computer. Supervisors got current status on each order. The traveler had started talking to the computer.

6. 1968 to 1973· General Motors Hydramatic

   Rungs instead of relays

   In 1968, Dick Morley’s team at Bedford Associates built the Modicon 084 for General Motors’ Hydramatic division. It replaced cabinets of relays and wire with a program, drawn in rungs like the relay diagrams electricians already read. Change the line, change the program. By 1973, General Electric sold machine controls built around a small computer. The machines now ran on software. Their counts and their faults were still written on paper.

7. 1952 to 1974· Troy, Ohio

   A beep at the checkout

   Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted a patent for the barcode in 1952. It took 22 years to reach a checkout. On June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a pack of Wrigley’s gum became the first product scanned by its Universal Product Code. Factories used the same trick. Print a code on the traveler, scan it at each step, and the computer knows which job moved, without anyone typing.

8. Around 1971· Japan

   One number for a machine

   In Japan, Seiichi Nakajima built total productive maintenance around one number. Nippondenso, a Toyota parts maker, is credited as the first plant to run it, around 1971, though some sources say the late 1960s. The number is overall equipment effectiveness, or OEE. How much of the planned time did the machine run? How fast, against its rated speed? How many parts were good? Multiply the three. Nakajima said many plants scored 50 percent or less.

9. 1980 to 1990· Historians and screens

   Every reading, saved

   In 1980, Pat Kennedy founded the company that became OSIsoft. Its PI System, first built in 1983, saved every reading from a plant’s sensors with a timestamp, so an engineer could look back at any minute. In 1987, Dennis Morin and Phil Huber started Wonderware. Its InTouch software put a live picture of the plant on a Windows screen. The control room could now see the floor, and look back at it.

10. 1990 to 1998· AMR Research and MESA

    A name for the middle

    Between the plan in the office and the machine on the floor sat the shift. In the early 1990s, analysts at AMR Research in Boston named its software: the manufacturing execution system. Some sources say 1990, others 1992. In 1997, the trade group MESA listed 11 things an MES does. Schedule the jobs. Dispatch them. Track labor, quality and maintenance. Trace each part’s history. Vendors like Consilium sold it to chip plants first.

11. 1989 to 2005· Purdue and ISA-95

    Drawing the levels

    Next, engineers drew a map. At Purdue, Theodore Williams and an industry group built a reference model of the plant in the early 1990s. That work fed a standard. On May 15, 2000, ISA approved the first part of ISA-95. It drew the levels. Level 4, business planning. Level 3, manufacturing operations, where MES sits. Levels 2 to 0, control and the machines. In 2005, Part 3 spelled out level 3.

12. 2004 to 2021· The vendors merge

    Bigger systems

    In 2004, MESA redrew its model to connect MES to everything around it: ERP, customers, suppliers, product design. The software grew to match, and the big automation companies bought the MES makers. Applied Materials had bought Consilium in 1998. Siemens agreed to buy Camstar in 2014. AVEVA closed its purchase of OSIsoft in 2021. Most MES was now sized and priced for large plants.

13. Today· Your shop

    The whiteboard

    Now walk a small job shop. A traveler rides with each job. Work orders sit in a tray. The schedule is on a whiteboard, and the person who keeps it is the system. Taylor’s route, Shewhart’s limits, the scan at each step, the OEE number: none of it needs a big plant. It needs one place where the quote, the job, the floor and the invoice meet. One you own.

Key dates

Where reputable sources disagree on a date or on who was first, the row says how.

Questions

Sources

1. Frederick W. Taylor, Encyclopaedia Britannica
2. Shop Management (1903), F. W. Taylor, Marxists Internet Archive
3. The Principles of Scientific Management, Wikipedia
4. Walter A. Shewhart, Wikipedia
5. History of numerical control, Wikipedia
6. The history of the bar code, Smithsonian Magazine
7. IBM 357, Wikipedia
8. Programmable logic controller, Wikipedia
9. Total productive maintenance, Wikipedia
10. The 1970s, American Machinist
11. Universal Product Code, Wikipedia
12. OSIsoft, Wikipedia
13. Wonderware, Wikipedia
14. Manufacturing execution systems, University of Pretoria dissertation
15. Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture, Wikipedia
16. An introduction to MES, Control.com
17. Applied Materials to acquire Consilium, Applied Materials news release
18. ANSI/ISA-95, Wikipedia
19. MESA White Paper 8: Next Generation Collaborative MES Model
20. Siemens to acquire Camstar, Digital Engineering 24/7

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