At Schneider Electric, Future of MES/MOM Lies in the Cloud

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Schneider Electric’s mission is to be the trusted partner for sustainability and efficiency. The company is helping customers across industries unlock efficiency, productivity, and resilience through digital transformation. Schneider Electric is also accelerating its own digital transformation across production facilities. It has therefore decided to gradually migrate the MES/MOM solution from iTAC Software AG, which has been in use for many years, to the AWS cloud at various locations. This ensures that processes can be digitalized, operated and scaled more easily and cost-effectively across the company.

Schneider Electric is a global industrial technology leader bringing world-leading expertise in electrification, automation and digitization to smart industries, resilient infrastructure, future-proof data centers, intelligent buildings, and intuitive homes. The company has been using the iTAC.MES.Suite (now iTAC.MOM.Suite) for the manufacture of cooling products and batteries for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) since 2010. As a leading provider of critical power solutions, Schneider Electric is innovating to provide reliable connectivity and power, from homes to industrial sites. The MES/MOM software solution from iTAC is used, among other things, for traceability, interlocking and quality control in the manufacturing process. 

iTAC's MES/MOM is currently used in ten production environments. These include 14 plants at different locations. All plants are to be successively connected to the cloud. Among others, the LA, Monterrey, Mexico City, Pennsylvania, Netherlands, Italy and Riga sites are already using the cloud solution. A migration in Batam (Indonesia) also took place without any problems in May 2024.

Significant cost savings at the Batam site

The example of Batam shows the advantages of MES/MOM in the cloud. “The on-premises hardware at the site in Indonesia was more than seven years old and needed to be replaced. Knowing that an MES is a business-critical application, we wanted to make the replacement as safe as possible. We had two options: either procure new hardware or migrate the iTAC application to the AWS cloud. After careful consideration, we decided to integrate the iTAC solution into the AWS cloud,” says Rahul Hege, Digital Manufacturing Leader at Schneider Electric.

The cloud migration in Batam offers major economic advantages. By using AWS cloud services, the company does not have to make any expensive hardware investments or take on any maintenance. Instead of having to operate servers and storage systems in its own data center, Schneider Electric can rely on the cloud provider's infrastructure. The company only pays for the resources it actually uses.

In addition to the cost savings, cloud usage in Batam enables better scalability, higher reliability and performance optimization as well as improved data backup and faster response times. The migration also contributes to the standardization of processes and technologies, which further increases efficiency and simplifies the management of the IT infrastructure.

Easier to digitalize, centralize and scale worldwide

The advantages achieved at the Batam site are exemplary of the potential that is opening up for the company with its numerous plants. Using the cloud platform also makes it much easier to network and optimize processes across company boundaries. Data from different locations can be centralized. This enables uniform data storage and processing, which increases efficiency and improves the quality of production data. The solution also provides real-time insights into production processes across different locations. This allows you to react quickly to changing conditions, identify bottlenecks and optimize production processes. Resources can be scaled as required and new functions and services can be easily integrated.

Supporting data security and energy efficiency

AWS also ensures a high level of data security and failure protection so that production data remains protected. “When all data is stored in the cloud, it remains secure from local disruptions and accessible. Amazon also offers a managed relational database service that is not only optimized for better performance, but also handles data backup and recovery.,” explains Rahul Hege.

Cloud usage also contributes to sustainability and energy efficiency, as Rahul Hege describes: “Cloud computing fits in perfectly with our strategy of promoting energy and CO2 savings in the industry. This concept helps to reduce energy consumption through the efficient use of resources and advanced technologies.”