METHOD FOR OPERATING A PLURALITY OF PRODUCTION PLANTS BY REGIONAL HUB CONCEPT OF THE MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM SOLUTIONS

It is the objective of the present invention to define a method that allows simplify the administration of an in particular larger MES/MOM project that may involve a plurality of manufacturing sites and a plurality of servers that require a stringent guidance on keeping patch and update threshold as low as possible. This objective is achieved according to the present invention by a method for operating a plurality of production plants by a manufacturing execution system, said method comprising the steps of: a) providing a central computational hardware as regional hub for running an MES software; said MES software being enabled to manage production processes throughout the plurality of production plants; b) configuring a first manufacturing execution system for a first single plant being connected to the regional hub; c) creating for each further plant the respective manufacturing executions system by inheriting all configurations of the first manufacturing execution system to these further manufacturing executions systems; and d) configuring these additional plants over time in the existing solution in the regional hub without re-installing the software of the manufacturing executions system and without re-applying some configurations already performed in the first plant and/or without stopping the system. This method therefore offers a better value for multi-plant solutions by decreasing the TCO. In practice, the same number of servers that is in the prior art needed to host the MES/MOM solution serving a single manufacturing plant is now made available to manage multiple plants (as represented in Figure 1). This set of servers constitutes a single MES/MONM solution distributed environment and is hosted by the same regional hub or anyway a single "virtual datacenter", according to the features provided by Cloud providers, in case a public Cloud deployment is chosen. La présente invention a pour objectif de définir un procédé qui permet de simplifier l'administration d'un plus grand projet MES/MOM en particulier qui peut impliquer une pluralité de sites de fabrication et une pluralité de serveurs qui nécessitent un guidage rigoureux pour le maintien d'un seuil de correctif et de mise à jour aussi bas que possible. Cet objectif est atteint selon la présente invention par un procédé de fonctionnement d'une pluralité d'installations de production par un système d'exécution de fabrication, ledit procédé comprenant les étapes consistant à : a) mettre en œuvre