Integration problems look technical and are usually definitional. Connecting before deciding which side is authoritative, and which side wins when numbers disagree, costs you confidence in both.
Items, BOMs and customers to ERP; work history and equipment data to MES.
Tabulate which data flows which way and when.
Make production quantity mean the same thing on both sides.
Decide how transmission failures, duplicates and after-the-fact corrections are handled.
MES and ERP run at different time resolutions. ERP changes when a transaction posts; MES changes when material and machines actually move. That lag cannot be removed. The goal of interface design is not eliminating it but making the resulting difference explainable.
The most common failure is managing the same data on both sides. If items exist in both and both can edit, they will diverge.
Following the order matters more than perfecting each step.
Items, BOMs and customers to ERP; work history and equipment data to MES. One system of record each. The non-owning side reads and cannot edit.
Tabulate which data flows which way and when. Separating what genuinely needs to be real time from what is fine daily simplifies the build considerably.
Make production quantity mean the same thing on both sides. Differing treatment of trial, rework and scrap means the numbers will not agree however well you connect them. Document it.
Decide how transmission failures, duplicates and after-the-fact corrections are handled. Without a procedure for correcting an already-transmitted result, this will become an operational problem.
Patterns that recur in implementation discussions.
The most common and longest-lived problem. Pick one owner and make the other read-only.
Not all data needs to be real time. Unnecessary real-time links only add failure points.
You connect, then come back to "the numbers do not match". Agreement precedes integration.
Floors do need to correct mis-entered results. Without a procedure, someone ends up editing the database directly.
Confirm these are in place before starting.
The procedure is the same without any product. These shorten the steps.
Questions that come up during evaluation.
In most cases yes, using whichever of the ERP's interfaces, database integration or file exchange is available.
It varies by element. Material movement affecting inventory should be frequent; results for cost closing are often fine daily.
Decide in advance. Typically MES for floor execution data and ERP for accounting outcomes, with the difference explainable either way.
You can, at the cost of entering the same data twice. Double entry produces errors and lag, and you end up reconciling anyway.
Equipment mix and current workflow determine how the procedure is adapted.
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