Developing Manufacturing Execution Software as a Service for Small and Medium Size Enterprise

Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) have been considered as the engine of economic growth and for promoting equitable development, many of the Small and Medium-size enterprise are suffering from the lack of the capabilities of research and development. SMEs will have to increase the agility and flexibility of their IT infrastructure, in order not to lose competitiveness and to respond quickly to customer's demand. Also the real time access to information and response to unplanned disruptive events are becoming important issues, due to the rigidity of the IT infrastructure. This research analyzes the needs and challenges faced by the IT infrastructure of Small and Medium Sized enterprises. The findings show that the communication between Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) and Manufacturing Execution system(MES) is not real time hence it affects the flexibility and agility of the system. To cover the gaps between MES and ERP, a Cloud based Software as a Service for MES (MESaaS) is proposed. This thesis (a) proposed a cloud based MES for SMEs (b) introduces a framework based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for designing the proposed MESaaS. It is concluded that using the proposed framework, there is a real time operation and the complexity of the IT infrastructure of the SMEs is reduced. Keywords: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Model-driven Architecture (MDA)