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| Field Report: Siemens & Microsoft MES Expertise Center Focus Days |
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Siemens and Microsoft hosted an event celebrating their new MES Expertise Center in Genoa on May 23-24. The joint European MES Expertise Center will support customers and partners in answering all questions about MES technologies, providing them with detailed information about the latest Siemens SIMATIC IT solutions, or the integrated Microsoft and Siemens technologies. The center will be managed by Microsoft and Siemens staff.
In addition to seeing the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems and Siemens solutions in action,
the MES Center will offer Microsoft/Siemens-hosted seminars and workshops to learn more about the benefits of integrated technologies available to them. Microsoft and Siemens will use the center to promote the use of existing industry standards such as ISA-95, as well as developing propositions for new standards that will create efficiencies for all manufacturing industries. ARC will also participate in an advisory role.
The event featured a number of activities evocative of those that manufacturers and implementation partners will
be able to take advantage of at the MES Expertise Center. There were technical sessions devoted to SIMATIC IT Production Suite, Microsoft Integration Platform, SIMATIC IT R&D Suite, Microsoft Collaboration Platform, Microsoft Plant Floor IT Infrastructure, and SIMATIC IT Intelligence Suite. There were live demos of complex industry scenarios such as Dairy and Automotive. ARC presented on the topic of "The critical Role of MES in Implementing Collaborative Manufacturing Strategies."
There also were interactive workshops
on topics such as Plant Visibility, Plant Efficiency, Collaborative Manufacturing, and Interoperability. In these workshops, participants came together using surveys, interactive discussions, and other techniques to dig into the topic at hand in some detail, to uncover trends and common practices, and to identify potential solutions. These workshops effectively demonstrated the power of coming together with key suppliers to explore a particular dimension of the broad MES space. In practice, it will be common to find that representatives from
within a group of similar manufacturers have come together for a half-day or full day workshop on a particular topic.
Microsoft and Siemens will use the MES Expertise Center to support their customers in dealing with MES technologies and to investigate solutions for optimizing their production processes. The MES Expertise Center is a unique location where Microsoft and Siemens can efficiently address requirements and issues related to this mission-critical IT environment, both from the infrastructure and application standpoints. In
the future, the MES Center of Expertise will also be available as a "virtual" environment to address the same issues in alternate venues.
The MES Center of Expertise will be an invaluable resource for manufacturers to learn about specific solutions to a broad range of issues affecting plant operations as well as the business as a whole. Siemens plans to conduct workshops tackling other topics, such as Lean Manufacturing and MES, Interoperability, Manufacturing Visibility and the Microsoft Office strategy, and other topics
in the coming months. |
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