MOM — comprehensive production management

There are many different definitions of managing production operations. What exactly do we mean by MOM and what advantages can your company gain from it?

Manufacturing Operations Management is a set of systems for managing complex production processes aimed at optimizing their performance.

Looking for an understandable and generally accessible definition of this concept, let’s move for a moment to the Department of Industrial Engineering of the American Purdue University in Indiana, where in the late 1980s one of the first models was created to facilitate the management of business processes and technologies necessary for the operation of the plant. It is known as the Purdue Reference Model for CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) and consists of layers 0–4:

Level 0: Physical process — defining actual physical processes.
Level 1: Intelligent devices — responsible for detecting and creating physical processes.
Level 2: Control systems — i.e. supervision, monitoring and control of physical processes: real-time control and software, DCS, HMI and SCADA.
Level 3: Production operations — responsible for managing the workflow to produce the desired products, including batch management, fulfillment systems, production management (MES / MOMS), maintenance and efficiency, etc.
Level 4: Business operations — consisting in managing the business activities of production operations. In this case, the basic system is ERP, which allows you to schedule the plant’s production, material consumption, shipment and inventory levels.

In the case of Manufacturing Operations Management, level 3 is particularly important, which focuses on the model of operation in the field of production operations management and includes four main areas of activity, namely:

• maintenance,
• production,
• quality,
• equipment.

According to the experts of the LNS Research research company, it is these four sets of business processes that form the broadest and comprehensive definition of Manufacturing Operations Management.

MOM and MES — similarities and differences

After defining what MOM actually is, another question arises: How is Manufacturing Operations Management different from the popular MES (Manufacturing Execution System) systems in the industry? Opinions among experts are divided. Some people believe that FEM is a subset of MOM, others that they describe different functional spaces, and yet another group says that both concepts describe exactly the same.
So let’s set the facts: the concept of FEM was created in the mid-1980s, while the term MOM appeared later and describes not only a slightly wider space, but above all a set of operations related to architecture and functionality that can be found in ISA-95, i.e. the standard, created by the International Automation Association for the development of an automated interface between corporate systems and control systems. In this case, the term Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) is used to describe the architecture and functionality of ISA-95 Level 3. MOM therefore involves the further development of MES tools, introducing a more holistic approach to production management and its implementation. Another theory argues that the name MOM was created for solutions that have evolved, including functions that do not exactly fit the original MES definition, such as quality, equipment, production management, enterprise production intelligence, and other advanced technologies.
Ultimately, however, MES and MOM relate to the same domain — the management and control of manufacturing operations, in line with the modeling and integration standards (ISA-95 and ISA-88).

The benefits of using MOM systems

MOM systems, including the FitMech system, thanks to the collection of information on production in real time and easy integration with equipment, controllers and ERP systems provide industrial plants with the following benefits, i.e .:

• faster delivery of finished goods to customers,
• controlling labor and machinery costs,
• reduction of downtime and bottlenecks,
• increasing productivity and efficiency,
• better information flow,
• analysis and continuous improvement of product quality,
• simplification of production processes,
• ensuring compliance with legal requirements,
• managing controlled inventory,
• elimination of waste,
• lower operating costs.

As a result, they enable full visibility and control of business processes, as well as optimization of production activities, from the order placed by the customer to the delivery of the finished product.

Do you want to know more? Contact Szymon Arciszewski (szymon@fitmech.com)