What software is used in manufacturing, system by system

The software used in manufacturing usually starts with an ERP, which runs orders, purchasing, costs and the books, often with material requirements planning (MRP) built in. Around it, a plant adds what its floor and engineers need: an MES or production tracking, a warehouse system, quality and maintenance tracking, and CAD, CAM and PLM for design. Controllers run the machines, and a historian logs their readings. Published lists of “the five types” do not agree on which five, so this guide sorts the systems by the record each keeps and the person who relies on it.

Who works in each system, and what it answers for them

Names vary: a small plant may call its MES production tracking, and a QMS can be a full product or a few screens in the ERP.

System	Who works in it	The question they bring	What it keeps
ERP, with MRP inside it	Planners, buyers and finance	What do we need to buy and make, and what will it cost?	Customer and production orders, the item master, routings and bills of materials, posted stock movements and costs, the books, and MRP's planned orders
MES or production tracking	Supervisors and operators	What is running on this line, and why did it stop?	Each order as it actually ran: quantities, scrap, stops, the lots consumed and who recorded them, plus the work instructions at each station
Warehouse or inventory system	Receiving, stores and shipping staff, on handhelds	Where is it, and how much is left?	Stock by bin and lot, moves, and staging to the line, while the ERP keeps quantity by location and lot, and the stock's value
Quality tracking or QMS	Operators, inspectors and quality engineers	Did this lot pass, and what is on hold?	Nonconformances, dispositions and corrective actions, with inspection results here, in the MES or ERP, or in a lab system
Maintenance system (CMMS or EAM)	Technicians and the maintenance planner	What was done to this machine last time?	Assets, work orders, spare parts and planned maintenance
CAD, CAM and PLM	Design and manufacturing engineers	Which revision is released?	Drawings and models, engineering BOMs, released revisions, engineering changes and machine programs
Controls, SCADA and the historian	Controls and process engineers, and operators at the machine's screen	What did the machine do, and when?	Machine signals and alarms, with their history in the historian

Does every plant run all of them?

No. A small job shop can run an accounting package or a small ERP, with spreadsheets and paper travelers on the floor. Many of the jobs in the table can also live inside the ERP: Odoo’s documentation shows shop floor screens where an operator raises a quality alert or a maintenance request, and NetSuite tracks work orders from the sales order through to finished goods. What a plant makes changes its records too. A process plant keeps batch records and recipes, where a discrete plant keeps routings and often serial numbers.

Where the ERP stops and the MES starts

The ERP and the MES are different jobs, even when one vendor sells both. ISA-95 is the International Society of Automation’s set of standards for integrating business and logistics systems with manufacturing control. ISA’s own description puts the ERP at Level 4, business planning and logistics, and the MES and other operations systems at Level 3, manufacturing operations management, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and other control devices below them.

The ERP books what the floor reports, and the MES keeps the detail behind each booking. Some records can sit on either side, such as scrap reasons, the hour-by-hour schedule for a line and the genealogy of a lot, and each plant has to decide where those live before the two systems are connected.

Where the handoffs break

Trouble shows up where a record crosses from one system to the next, and each crossing has a direction.

From the office to the floor

A released order that is changed or canceled in the ERP has to reach the station before the next shift starts it. So does an engineering change, which ASCM’s supply chain dictionary defines as a revision to a drawing or design released by engineering. The engineering and manufacturing BOMs are often separate records. If the manufacturing BOM, the routing, the machine programs and the station instructions do not all change at the agreed effective point, the line can keep building the old revision past it while every system reports normal.

From the floor to the ERP

An ERP that backflushes deducts components each time a quantity is reported against an order or operation, at what the bill of materials says should have been used. The same dictionary names the cost: “a built-in differential between the book record and what is physically in stock.” Scrap and substitutions have to be reported on their own. Where lots are tracked, the confirmation has to carry the lots the floor used, or the ERP backflushes whichever lots its own rule picks.

From quality to the warehouse

A hold, raised by a person or a supplier notice, has to reach the ERP and the warehouse system, which allocate and pick stock, and the MES for any of that lot already at the line. If it lives only in the quality system, or on a tag hung from the pallet, the ERP and the warehouse system still count the lot as available, and the next pick can send it to the line or to a customer. The release or scrap decision then has to follow the same path.

From the machine to the MES

A controller or historian knows that a machine stopped and when, and fault stops can be classified from the controller’s own fault codes. The rest need an operator’s reason, entered at the stop and not at the end of the shift, or the “other” category fills up. The plant’s controls team decides what the machine makes available and through which gateway, and floor software should read only that, never the control network.

Where custom software fits among them

Custom software earns its place in those handoffs, and in records no product keeps the way a particular plant needs them. It leaves the ERP as the system of record for orders, book stock and its value, cost and the books, and where a product already does the job well, buy it.

We have not built software for a plant. Our ERP integrations on the business side, with SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Odoo and Microsoft Dynamics 365, were for clients in other industries. The manufacturing software we offer to build comes in four kinds: MES and production tracking, ERP integration and custom ERP modules, inventory and warehouse systems, and quality and maintenance tracking. CAD, CAM and PLM, EAM suites, SCADA, historians, lab systems and dedicated scheduling tools are specialist products we would not rebuild. What we build would read from them, and from machines only through what the plant’s controls team makes available. Beside an EAM suite, our maintenance tracking would send line requests and run hours into the EAM as work requests, leaving work orders there.

If we build beside your ERP, every connection is written down first: which system owns each record, which way data flows and how often, and what happens when a connection fails. A free first call comes before a short paid assessment, which produces that map and a fixed, itemized quote, and the people who scope the build are the people who build it. That assessment is where our custom manufacturing software development work begins.

The full service behind this post: Manufacturing Software Development Company.