Dear Friends and Colleagues,
How much should I invest in the high availability of my ERP & MES systems”? Several of our customers and partners asked me this questions during the last weeks.
High Availability solutions in general allow you to keep your applications operating continuously. It’s done by providing both physically or virtually shared disk and shared memory systems.
In general, I would recommend high availability solutions both for ERP and MES. Of course, you have to put a lot of money on the table to get the high availability. If you are not willing to invest it both for your ERP and MES I would strongly recommend to implement it at least for your mission-critical production MES systems.
The reason for it is as follows: Surely, it is troublesome for business users from planning, procurement, marketing, sales & finance departments when ERP is not available for one hour. But, an ERP outage normally doesn’t effect production seriously because modern MES always have an buffer with valid production orders. Other ERP main data like material definitions, specifications and recipes are available on MES as well and don’t change every hour. It’s another story with mission-critical MES. An MES outage can stop your production completely and cost you a lot of money and reputation with your customers.
For the big enterprises it’s a must to use high availability solutions for both ERP and MES. Today the multi-nationals are going to abolish the existing numerous ERP instances which they have implemented during the past 10-20 years locally or regionally. Now they are planning to implement a single worldwide ERP system. An it’s very clear: such global ERP systems which are used by ten thousands of users need the highest possible availability and an in-built scalability.
Many Greetings and ‘Everything is gonna be alright!
Yours,
Detlef Riedel
Xavo/CEO
One comment for "Do I need High Availability?"
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Tobias Steffenhagen
01.04.2010 | 01:30 Uhr
I fully agree, you need an high available MES in order to provide continuously and high-value progress for your production. I would even go further, basically all software layers - from MES over SCADA to PLC - could possibly be mission-critial for production.
Dependent on the volume of the orders, a failure of ERP doesn’t effect the MES from several minutes up to a few days. However this does not apply for the software applications below due to strong interdependency, often as well as the lack of data buffering. In the worst case, this could cause downtimes of your production and even inconsistent/corrupted quality related data.
Therefore, high available systems combined with preventive maintenance is the best alternative to minimize software caused downtimes. In this spirit: “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” [Steve Jobs]
Kind regards and Happy Easter!