3. MES deployment

3.1 IT project

It may sound like a truism, but an MES project essentially involves the development and configuration of one or more software programs on a suitable architecture. In other words, it's an IT project. In fact, software development in factories has not always been treated with the same rigor as in corporate IT departments. There are two reasons for this. The first is that budgets allocated to software development on the factory floor, where they exist, are often low. The second is more pernicious. Indeed, the user-friendliness of supervisory software parameterization, combined with intuitive scripting languages, has led to increasingly important development tasks being entrusted to automation specialists who simply master the supervisor language, without any real project...