Case USA59: How a Manufacturing Platform Mistook MES Dashboards for Enterprise Architecture Maturity

Sunil Dutt Jha
Aug 5
1 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Overview:

This case is part of a 100-diagnostic series revealing how US manufacturing firms have mislabeled operational dashboards as “Enterprise Architecture progress.”

A recurring pattern is treating Manufacturing Execution System (MES) dashboards as evidence of architectural maturity.

Shop-floor supervisors could see production metrics in real time, downtime alerts were faster, and throughput reporting improved — yet the enterprise structure linking design, supply chain, production, quality, and customer delivery was never modeled.

P1–P6 Insight Preview:

P1 (Strategy): The MES program was justified as an Industry 4.0 transformation, but no enterprise roadmap linked the dashboards to end-to-end manufacturing performance and customer commitments.

P2 (Process): In-plant workflows for monitoring and reporting were clear, but upstream design changes and downstream logistics remained disconnected.

P3 (System): MES connected to shop-floor equipment but had no defined behavior model for interacting with ERP, PLM, and warehouse systems.

P4 (Component): Sensors, data collectors, and reporting modules were implemented plant-by-plant with inconsistent standards.

P5 (Implementation): Rollouts were focused on visualizing local KPIs rather than aligning architecture across plants.

P6 (Operations): Business ops could track performance instantly, but tech ops managed a growing number of isolated integrations; both had no ability to forecast or optimize enterprise-wide production.

Role Disconnects:

CEO: “We’ve made our plants transparent in real time” — but corporate decisions are still made on monthly summaries.
CIO: “We integrated MES with our equipment” — yet it’s still disconnected from the rest of the enterprise.
Sales Head (Accounts): “We can commit to tighter delivery dates” — until cross-plant dependencies break them.
Chief EA: “We visualized shop-floor performance, not the manufacturing enterprise”
Head of Plant Operations: “I can fix today’s bottlenecks, but I can’t see how changes impact other sites”