MOM vs MES: Operation Management vs Execution System

What is the difference between MES and MOM?

Lately you hear the term MOM more and more often, this also very often in combination with MES. But is there actually a difference between MES and MOM and why are these two terms used side by side? You can read the answer in this article.

A Manufacturing Execution System, abbreviated MES, emerged in the mid-1980s. It developed as the intermediate layer between PLC/SCADA and ERP.

The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) receives production orders from the ERP system. And ensures that the various production departments are provided with the correct information. MES collects data from production via PLC/SCADA and makes it available to the ERP system. You can read more about MES on this page.

The first MES solutions were not that extensive yet

The companies that started working with MES demanded certain functionalities in MES. The desire to have employees who are directly involved in the production process work in one system contributed to the fact that MES suppliers continued to expand their MES based on customer demand. For example, functionalities were added that could be related to quality, stock and maintenance. MES communicates with ERP in these areas as well.

In the case of stock, it initially concerned specifically the stock on the production floor. But the MES supplier soon saw that it had many advantages to also offer WMS functionality. The WMS became an extension of the MES and could then also be purchased stand-alone at some point. Nowadays, the term MOMS is used to quickly indicate what kind of application is involved. You can immediately deduce from this that the application goes further than purely production-related functionality.

MOM stands for Manufacturing Operations Management and aims to produce with as little waste as possible. MOMS software helps with this and is not limited to the production process.

MOM, MES and the ISA-95 model

If you look at the ISA-95 model (image 1), you will see that Level 3 is called the Manufacturing Operation Management level. In figure 2 you can see that MES, WMS, LIMS and MMS are also part of level 3. At a number of MOMS suppliers, MES and WMS have reached a mature level. LIMS and MMS are often less extensively integrated in MOMS, there are good reasons for this, but more about this in the following blogs.