Diseño e implementación de un sistema MES flexible y de bajo costo para la mediana empresa

In these days, the globalization worldwide represents enormous challenges for most manufacturing small and middle industry in Latin America and consequently for Mexico. More and more, the necessity to have well organized production systems, accurate information availability and manufacturing activities control, has forced the companies to adopt new technologies, computing tools and software packages in order to gain good production management practices and becoming a stronger competitor in the present world conditions. Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), a new software application developed for enterprise information integration and manufacturing activities monitor, provides the required production management to better respond market demands and expectations. However, up to date commercial MES software is hardly adaptable to the middle industry needs besides high investments could be required to fully implement it. For that reason, the MES software design proposed in the present research, is guided to solve these mentioned problematic conditions and develop an MES easily adaptable and configurable system according to the main middle industry requirements, moreover being economically accessible for most of them. In order to achieve these goals, the proposed MES software design is based on a modular architecture supported by object-oriented technology (Visual C++), engineering software design, in this case the UML methodology, and commonly used data base systems such as Access, as shown in the case study implementation. Some of the relevant conclusions of the present research were: a) The different functionalities of the proposed MES software match with the organization and information flow requirements of the small and middle industry In Mexico; b) The resulting MES system could easily and economically be implemented to support enterprise production organization and c) The modularity configuration of the software could be improved to make a stronger automatic system and let its implementation as easy as possible in future applications.