Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are the central control and information system in manufacturing plants and connect the ERP system with the production process. The MES standards defined in ISA-95 are long and complex. Manufacturing plants are organized in different ways and need individual MES functions and data structures. These are often hard to manage with standard software solutions.

The MES Toolbox offers you an economical route to developing an individual solution, which will remain open for extensions and further development in the future.

We have deployed MES solutions based on our MES Toolbox components in the steel industry (rolling mills, continuous casting lines, strip processing) with Siemens AG in Erlangen, Germany and in China. Johann Warmuth, the MES project manager in China, says: "Using the MES Toolbox made both the project development and the setup of the production lots significantly faster. This has a positive effect on customer satisfaction and on profitability".

The software development kit (SDK) for .NET 2.0 is a general development framework for the Microsoft .NET platform which has been developed completely in C#. It enables software developers to develop applications faster. The class library contains many modules which allow quicker development of database applications. Features such as user permissions can be integrated and configured practically without effort.

MES is a basic system created with an SDK for .NET and contains the following components:

The dialogues for all these components are localized in German, English and Chinese.

Material tracking is a central element of MES and is needed to monitor progress, control the processing instructions, evaluate quality and retrospective tracing of process steps. GTRAX allows you to assign parameters that model the specific equipment layout and workflow, covering the following aspects:

The objects being traced are localized in particular material zones based on the events and tracing strategies. Individual events can trigger project-specific actions (e.g. sending of a processing instruction).

The open architecture of GTRAX allows integration of any factory-specific data structure. Parameters are programmed in a ready-made user interface.

GTRAX gives software developers a tested platform on which they can build a customer-specific material tracing application.

Data Bridge is a programmable software application for data exchange in homogeneous or heterogeneous environments. It is designed for communicating with databases or via OPC or TCP. A data telegram can be sent to multiple addressees. Conversion functions can be used to make the data compatible with different senders and receivers.

Data Bridge is configured flexibly using XML files, which makes it easy to edit telegram formats.