MES as an Enabler of Lean Manufacturing

Many firms have adopted Lean Manufacturing as a means of increasing productivity and reducing cost, often by focusing on the implementation of Lean best practices to identify and eliminate waste. This paper explores the application of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to support the waste identification and elimination process. The majority of MES vendors have now incorporated Lean functionality in their software, but a comprehensive methodology that explains how MES can be used to enable and promote Lean Manufacturing is still lacking. This paper aims at filling this gap by presenting a Lean-MES framework. The proposed framework is validated and extended through a market analysis of MES software, identifying areas for further development for MES vendors.