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Selling MES Joanna Cortez Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:29

Lauren and Shay meet with the MES Product Manager from Sepasoft, Keith Adair, to discuss using MES to improve customers’ operations, increase production efficiency, and the best way to communicate all of the advantages of using MES to customers. Keith shares details on the modules that Sepasoft provides and how they work with Ignition. Keith also talks about using the modules enterprise-wide and Sepasoft’s Business Connector Suite. Learn about a flexible, all-in-one solution by combining Ignition and Sepasoft Modules, and best practices for presenting those MES solutions.

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Selling MES
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Selling MES
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00:09
Shay: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MES solutions. I'm Shay.

00:14
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. We're sitting down with Keith Adair, the MES Product Manager at Sepasoft. We'll be talking to him about using MES to improve customers’ operations, increase production efficiency, and how to best communicate to customers all the advantages of using MES.

00:29
Shay: Keith, thanks for being here today.

00:31
Keith: Thanks for having me.

00:32
Shay: Before we jump into talking about selling MES, I wanted to know how you got started with Sepasoft and your role there.

00:38
Keith: Sure, so I actually came at this from a customer service perspective. I played a support role at various places and I started at Sepasoft in support, in fact. I worked for a while in that role, and then I moved on to QA and then I picked up this role as product manager. So, as product manager, I help plan releases, new features, new products, and I help deliver webinars and product demonstrations and all kinds of stuff at Sepasoft.

01:04
Shay: Awesome.

01:05
Lauren: That sounds really exciting.

01:06
Keith: Yeah, it's fun.

01:07
Lauren: Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. What is MES?

01:11
Keith: MES, or Manufacturing Execution Software, is a software that sits between your control system and your higher-level ERP system, or Enterprise Resource Planning system like Oracle or SAP. So, it's that stuff in the kind of the “messy middle” there, like we like to say. So, things that you might do at the MES layer is like measure your production efficiency, sequence what happens on your machines next, take samples, manage machine set points, traceability and genealogy, facilitate communication between control and ERP layers, things like that. That's what you might do at the MES layer.

01:44
Shay: So now that we know a little bit about what MES is, are you able to tell us what modules Sepasoft offers for MES and kind of how they come into play?

01:51
Keith: Sure, there are kind of two buckets of modules that we make at Sepasoft. There's the MES side, and there's our new Business Connector suite. So if we start with MES, the first module we ever sold back in 2011, was the OEE and Downtime Module. It's still the one that we sell the most of, and it's all about measuring your manufacturing efficiency, quantifying downtime, causes and sources. What are your top five downtime reasons? What equipment caused this downtime? Where can we make improvements on our performance or our availability or our quality? And it has this really great detailed scheduling engine.

02:23
Keith: So if you do your scheduling at a higher level, like SAP, you can pull that in and make my new adjustments or whatever you need to do. So that's the OEE and Downtime Module. We have the Track and Trace Module, which is all about what it sounds like: traceability, genealogy. Where did this raw good come from? When we unload it off the truck, how do we use that raw good? I have this finished car here. What parts went into this car? And you can see this whole tree, we call it a trace graph, of what went into this finished good and how a raw good got used, which is extremely vital for anyone who's doing things like audits or recalls.

03:01
Keith: Imagine doing a recall without a traceability report. You really couldn't do it. And this module is engineered to help you do that. And it uses that same scheduling engine that the OEE Module uses. So if you have both modules installed, you have one place where you're doing your scheduling. It's pretty nice. We have the SPC Module, which is about taking samples. So, my favorite example that I cite is we have an automobile manufacturer who uses it to keep their door gaps in check. It can't be too wide, it can't be too close. That's what people use the SPC Module for: Taking measurements, maybe measuring a PH value in a solution and what have you. And if a sample is late or if it's not within their set control limits, they can trigger alarms and Ignition using the Ignition Alarm Monitoring (i.e. Alarm Notification) Module.

03:44
Keith: And then you can use it to measure bad parts, which we call non-conforming parts, or flaws within those parts, non-conformities. That's SPC. We have the Recipe Module, which is about the creation of recipes or groups of machine set points. So if you're entering a process and you wanna change the speed or the package count, you would adjust that recipe value. And then when you go to start that new production run, you might fire a different recipe down. Those all get rated at the same time in real time, and then you watch those values for change. So, if Joe who's manning the case packer turns up his speed, we can have an alarm go off and say, "Hey don't do that."

04:21
Lauren: So you mentioned how alarming can be triggered in Ignition with the SPC Module. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the MES modules and Ignition? How do they interact with each other?

04:33
Keith: Sure, so our MES modules install right into Ignition. So you just install them right on the platform, like any other module. So like you install the Vision Module with an MODL file, you just install it into Ignition. Our modules go in just like that. So that means that if we need to generate your report from OEE data, we can do so using the Reporting Module. We don't have to reinvent the wheel anywhere. Ignition talks to the machine, so we don't need to know how to talk to those machines.

05:00
Keith: That PLC connectivity comes natively in Ignition. Likewise, we depend on Ignition for database connectivity. So using that great Ignition platform is a benefit to our modules as well. By being a module installed in the Ignition platform, we can take advantage of all those things that the Ignition platform has to offer. Tags, database connectivity, PLC connectivity. All the other modules, like the Reporting Module, the Alarm Notification Module, we can use all those resources in our software and not have to reinvent the wheel there.

05:27
Shay: So is the functionality provided by those modules limited to a single site or if a customer has an entire enterprise can they use those enterprise-wide?

05:36
Keith: Well, funny you should ask. New for this year, going into 2020 here, we have this enterprise functionality. So all of these modules, if installed at Ignition Gateways throughout your global enterprise, can talk to each other. So if you have a sample definition that you've defined, it can be shared to all your different sites. And everyone's taking the same samples and the same processes at your different sites. You can compare site by site. What's everyone's OEE score? What's everyone's downtime? You can trace a good that started in Kentucky and finished in Florida, that's all built into the software and the functionality there. So that's new for this year, and users at headquarters can review data from that whole enterprise. They have that whole global picture of all that data, all at once.

06:20
Lauren: So you have talked about a lot of MES modules, but I know Sepasoft also has some modules around business connectivity. Could you talk about some of those as well?

06:29
Keith: Absolutely. So we have our new Business Connector suite, which consists of three different modules. First is the Business Connector. It's sort of, as it might sound, the business engine. It's where you build these really great sequential drag-and-drop charts that visually represent your communication with a higher level system, like an ERP system, that could be SAP, it could be Dynamics 365, it could be Oracle. You build these charts that visually lay out these communications and then you can use them to bring in data into Ignition, send data up to the ERP, save off material definitions into our MES software. It works with our MES stuff, but if you're not using those modules, it still works on its own. That suite contains not just the Business Connector module but also two other modules, there's the Interface for SAP ERP, which gives the Business Connector the ability to talk to SAP. It's an SAP-certified module, and it can be used to communicate with any on-prem SAP server, so if you have an S3 server, an SAP HANA server, we can talk to those. It's pretty cool.

07:35
Keith: And then we finally have the Web Services Module. And, we've been selling that for a few years and it works with or without Business Connector, but it gives you the power to communicate with REST or SOAP APIs. So many of these other ERPs like Dynamics 365 and Oracle can communicate over REST and SOAP, so we can talk to those two.

07:54
Shay: So what you're saying is that you can use these modules to connect to your SCADA and MES systems up to business-level applications like ERP systems?

08:03
Keith: That's right, and it really helps you eliminate those pain points, like shared database queries, you don't wanna open your database up to call some other systems, you wanna use the native supported ways of doing so. No more flat files, no more ungainly Python scripts that administer this stuff. We can support it with this kind of really flexible, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop solution, so the next guy who comes in and has to improve on what you made, just sees this beautifully laid-out chart that they can see and understand how it works without having to make lots of guess work or lots of reworking. And what's really cool is all these modules are just kind of like Ignition, they're modular, so you don't need to install all of them, you can just install the ones that you need. If you don't need to talk to SAP, don't buy the Interface for SAP Module. They all work together nicely and there are benefits to having them all on your system, but only buy the things you need. They all work together on their own or in tandem.

08:56
Lauren: Awesome, and I know you guys just received an exciting recognition recently. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

09:01
Keith: Sure, well, we were reviewed by Gartner in the last year, and they actually reached out to us which is pretty cool, and they placed us on their so-called Magic Quadrant and they rated us Top Five -Ability to Execute, which is very exciting. There are sort of brutally honest folks over there, and so we have all these reviews from them and from our customers that I think speak really well to our ability to execute and deliver great MES solutions.

09:25
Shay: Wow, congratulations.

09:27
Keith: It's very exciting.

09:27
Lauren: Yeah, congrats.

09:28
Shay: That is. So what is it about the combination of Ignition and the Sepasoft modules that puts this MES solution in the top five?

09:34
Keith: Well, I think it's a flexible all-in-one solution. Typically the manufacturing stack is three layers, right? It's ERP, it's MES, and it's controls. What we're saying is, "Hey, take your MES and combine it with your control system, Ignition", and it's just, we're flattening that stack down, we're helping those layers talk to each other, we're making it more of a combined all-in-one solution. Ignition is really a logical platform for us because all the data that we need is in the Ignition solution. We need equipment set points, we need quantities, we need state data. That's all in Ignition, we can just use it. It makes it a lot easier for us and it makes it so much easier to develop and execute on an MES solution as opposed to a separate software stack for MES. Our models are used all over the world. We have customers in Latin America, in Asia, in Europe and Australia, and of course, here in the States and we have 600-plus MES implementations worldwide, pretty proud of that. We have a strong support infrastructure, so we have 30-plus certified MES integrators and we have a really great internal support team, our technical support is great.

10:40
Keith: We also have this great team of design consultants that can help you get your project from working to excellence and we're always there to help you be successful. We have a really great competitive price point, we try to mimic Inductive Automation's pricing, in that we have unlimited screens, unlimited clients, in fact, we sell our modules by the line or by the site and in fact, we're trying to get more into that low-end price point with our OEE Lite Module, which is a version of our OEE Module with a few restrictions in the feature set that can help you get going faster at a lower price point. We stand up really well to the pricing of the other players in his area, I think.

11:15
Lauren: So I understand that an MES implementation can be a little more complicated than your average SCADA application.

11:22
Keith: Absolutely.

11:23
Lauren: So how should an integrator go about approaching MES when they're trying to sell that to their customers? What do they need to know?

11:30
Keith: We want you to always have us in mind, when you're trying to sell an MES solution. However we do have a certification process that we might suggest you go through or you could even sub-contract to one of our certified MES integrators that we already have in the market, but our training solutions are first-class. We have online training, we have video training, we have on-site training here in sunny Northern California that you can attend and gain that knowledge and become a certified MES integrator. What we want to avoid is folks who maybe don't have the training going off and maybe not having a successful implementation and that leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. So we really think that with the tools we provide and the training we can provide, we can get everyone to provide that successful MES implementation.

12:12
Lauren: So it's really important to know your stuff before you go in throwing around MES ideas?

12:17
Keith: Right. So maybe if you used a competitor's MES solution in the past, you'd probably be a good fit for using ours as well. We love training new folks and getting them going, but we don't want someone to kind of go off on their own and maybe not have a successful implementation. If you want to start an MES project, please take advantage of our resources that we have made available.

12:36
Shay: So how do we know when an MES solution is a good fit for a customer?

12:40
Keith: Sure, well, there's some questions we look out for. So we wanna understand what's causing all this downtime, maybe they want the OEE Module. We want to schedule our upcoming operations and figure out how we're gonna be spending our upcoming days and weeks. The OEE Module or the Track and Trace Module. We need to capture traceability data. How do we use this raw good, how do I perform a recall? Well, that's again the Track and Trace Module. We need to fetch data from SAP and send this result back up, Business Connector plus Interface for SAP Module. We need to set machine set points and monitor those values for changes, that's the Recipe Module. You can look out for these sorts of questions and they'll tip you off to know whether you should talk MES with a potential customer. We need to perform inspections and collect sample data, that could be an SPC Module question, so just look out for those kind of key questions that guide you towards our MES solutions.

13:35
Lauren: So let's say, we hear those magic words, we know that they are looking for an MES solution. What's the best way to go about presenting an MES solution from Sepasoft?

13:45
Keith: We strongly suggest you contact your Inductive rep or go to sepasoft.com/request-demo and request a demo, you'll get a demonstration from someone like me or my other colleagues in the design consultation department, where we can demonstrate how the MES software works, give examples of implementations, show some screens, some functionality, that's the best way to get folks to understand what's in the offering here. We have case studies on our website and videos where we actually go on customer sites and see their operation. Those are at sepasoft.com/videos and you can also demonstrate the product using our publicly available demo, that's at demo.sepasoft.com.

14:27
Shay: Well, Keith, thanks so much for sitting down with us today to talk about Sepasoft solutions for MES and business connectivity. It's been great and I think we've both learned a lot.

14:35
Lauren: We have.

14:36
Keith: Absolutely, thanks for your time.
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