TECHNOLOGY AND IIOT DIGITAL TOOLS

Switching from ERP to MES Drives

Improvement for Plastics
Manufacturer
Dec. 15, 2023
Deep in Wisconsin, a plastics company discovered that
enterprise resource planning might be great for big picture
thinking, but manufacturing execution systems provided the
detail you need to improve floor operations.
Dennis Scimeca

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It’s okay to admit that your enterprise resource planning (ERP) day…Distributors Outlook for 2021
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system isn’t up to the task of increasing efficiency, lowering scrap Distributors
rates, determining ideal cycle times and everything else you get from
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Patrick Austin, president at Midwest Precision Molding in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin, has a background in finance, working for
manufacturers such as Snap-on Tools and Masterlock. He’s also beenThe
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responsible for HR and IT departments at other companies. So, whenBest Plants…
his family purchased plastics manufacturers Plasti-Coil and Tri Tec,
he came on board to merge the companies. MEMBERS ONLY

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At previous positions Austin ran point on manufacturing execution IndustryWeek
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system (MES) implementations and understood their value. He also
knew many manufacturers often embrace custom modules or reports MEMBERS
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for their existing ERP system, an easier route in the short-term. It can CONTENT
So That
also make life very difficult (and expensive) for a manufacturer that Happened:
wants to keep building on the software. All Aboa…

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So, Austin decided to change the company over from an ERP system ONLY
CONTENT
to MES software. If not for this fortuitous decision, MPM might have So That
failed to handle the COVID-19 epidemic that slammed into the Happened:
Dog…
production schedule only a few months after bringing the new MES
online. MOST READ

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Patrick Austin, president, Midwest Precision Molding Distributors
Smith & Associates Opens Sales Office in
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Improving Floor Operations Requires Details Powered by:

MPM manufactures around 1,000 SKUs, including many high-end
parts such as the injection-molded threads inside brass tubes used in
linear actuators.

“These are not shoot and ship parts. These are extremely difficult,
tight tolerance parts to make, [often] going into different medical
applications. The requirements are really strict,” Austin says.

Plasti-Coil originally ran on a simplistic ERP system adequate for a

small job shop. Tri Tec ran on a DOS-based system when Austin’s
family acquired the company, so Austin switched Tri Tec to the same
ERP system deployed at Plasti-Coil.

The system didn’t capture cycle times, routings, number of parts

produced or scrap rates. It provided no visibility into machine uptime
or downtime or reasons why machines went down. It was fine for
high-level analysis like running financial statements and tracking
sales but couldn’t shed insight on plant operations.

Austin found this frustrating as he had access to a wide net of IoT

devices on the floor.

“We have some really nice injection molding machines. … Higher end
systems have a lot of outputs that you can get data out of. I did
actually have one of them hooked into the ERP system where I could
gather information from the press, but the amount of information
that it was gathering was huge. And the problem is, how do you use
that information?,” Austin says. READ THE LATEST

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“[The ERP system] didn’t have the capabilities to hook up to real-time
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[data capture], like the current MES system does. … Bill of materials,
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routings and reporting…it wasn’t easily transferable out to Excel. Distributors
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Without a ton of manipulation, the ERP reports were pretty standard
Bangalore

and basic. There just really wasn’t a lot of information that you could
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get from them,” Austin says.
“The data is so critical, knowing machine uptime and downtime,
when the next job’s going in...Tri Tec was doing their scheduling in
Excel so anytime there was a change made to the schedule, it [took]
several hours,” Austin adds.

The Sodick GL150A presses used at MPM feature native data capture capability - but without an MES system LOGIN JOIN SEARCH
to process the information it's "essentially a data dump," says Austin.

Avoid the ERP Sunk-Cost Fallacy

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Austin knew better than to try customizing MPM’s ERP system.
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“I’ve never heard anybody in any ERP system that says, ‘Yeah, Rugged
Enterprise…
customizations are great!’ If you do customizations, and you go to
upgrade, now all of a sudden you’re breaking those customizations,”
Austin says.

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Austin had run six previous MES implementations and was well READ THE
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aware of the software options. He ruled out large systems Supply Chain Resources
immediately. He’d used IQMS, an MES heavily used in the plastics Electronics Distributors Outlook for 2021
industry, but instead chose Epicor MES based on the friendliness ofTo Buy orWhere
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its user interface, ease of IT management, available report types and Can You
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ease of data import/export. Bangalore

Installation of the new MES finished at the end of 2019, just a few Powered by:

months before the COVID epidemic. Austin credits the software with
his company’s ability to navigate the most difficult production
schedule he’s ever had to manage.

“We have a large number of customers in medical and various

industries that were considered essential. … customers in need of
these parts ASAP. Some of them went into respirators, and we make a
number of different parts that go into medical printers and EKGs and
heart monitors, so we had to shift a ton of stuff around. I can’t even
describe the amount of changes that were being made,” Austin says.

Everyone wanted their parts, everyone wanted them now and MPM
had to keep every customer updated on the status of every order to
keep them happy. Without the MES, Austin says, it would have been
impossible.

“We’d have had to guess or go out [on the floor], count parts, figure
out how many parts we have, how many do we have to make, what’s
the cycle time and then guess at what it’s going to take to finish that
run and then try to squeeze in another one behind it,” Austin says.

Running production through MES software granted MPM the ability

to drag and drop jobs across schedules, shuffling them from press to
press to free up needed availability on specific machines for specific
orders, without any issues.

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A helical gear used in electric motors, notoriously difficult to mold based on the angle of the teeth and
shrinking after ejection from the mold. MPM invested heavily in digital equipment to make sure parts like this
gear meet customer expectations.

The Value of Knowing What You Didn’t Know

Running an MES also allowed MPM to tackle the quality issues
Austin faced when he began with the company. Previously, working
with the ERP system, Austin could track total scrap produced but not
much else. With the MES, he can identify rejects by part number and
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determine which tools on the floor need repair, reducing downtime
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and scrap.
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The MES can draw relationships between quality results and To Buy or Not to Buy From Independent
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personnel shifts. In one example, the software identified that a drop
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in quality checks coincided with a break relief. This allowed MPM to
Bangalore

pinpoint which operator had gone on break and returned, based on

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when quality results returned to levels before the drop. This, in turn,
allowed the company to put emphasis on specific employee training
programs to optimize cycle times.

For Austin, intangibles like identifying where to shore up training

prove the value of an MES more than slapping a dollar value on cost
savings or increased productivity. What is the quantifiable value for
identifying problems you didn’t previously know existed?

“We’ve had incidences where we’d be running pretty good cycle times,
or what we thought was a good cycle time, pretty fast, [and then]
second shift operator would start and he was running a lot slower, but
his parts turned out to be better than the previous shift. So, we ended
up slowing it down, all of a sudden quality improves and we don’t
have rejects,” says Austin.

Boards on the floor display all the presses and their cycle times,
allowing floor managers to address issues with operators when cycle
times fall out of spec and risk increasing reject and scrap rates.

“You can try to pin it down to hard savings… but at the end of the day,
it’s [about] how can I be more efficient? How can I run smoother
changeovers? [Prior to installing the MES] I can’t tell you how many
times a machine would be sitting [idle] for a long time and you’d have
to go out there and ask ‘What’s going on?,’” Austin says. “If
somebody’s getting hung up on one press or changeover, can’t get it
started, maybe throw some resources at it, fix the problem, and then
that improves your efficiencies. I don’t know that we would have been
able to make those determinations had we not had some sort of MES
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system in place.”
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Austin says the biggest challenge when switching over from an old Distributors
ERP to a new MES system is providing clean data. Bringing garbageSmith & Associates Opens Sales Office in
Bangalore
data from an old system into a new system doesn’t help anything.
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Training is also critically important.
“Make sure that all your key departments really understand how to
use [the new] system. That’s going to save you a lot of headaches on
the other side. The more effort they put in up front, the better it’s
going to go once you're actually up and using it the new system,”
Austin says.

Finally, Austin advises companies to make sure they follow through

with complete implementation, rather than getting impatient.

“I’ve been with several companies that get a system, get it half
implemented and it’s good enough. They stop, while following
through all the way, getting the most benefit out of the system, that’s
really what you spend the money for, to utilize all the tools that are
there,” Austin says.

“Preparation is key. The more you know about the system ahead of
time, the better you’re going to be when it comes time to flip the
switch,” he adds.

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