MES (Manufacturing Execution System).
Software that tracks production on the shop floor — what's being made, where it is in the process, what stage each job is at. The "production-floor brain" of a manufacturing business.
In plain English
A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is the software that tracks production on your shop floor. Where ERP handles the commercial side (orders, invoices, accounts), MES handles the operational side — what's being made right now, who's working on it, what stage it's at, when it's expected to finish.
The gap between ERP and MES is real. Most SMB manufacturers and fabricators have an ERP (Sage, NetSuite, or a custom system) but no MES — production lives on whiteboards, paper job cards, and Excel. The cost of that gap is invisible until it isn't: jobs slip, capacity is misjudged, customer commitments get missed because no one knows where job X actually is.
Off-the-shelf MES products exist but tend to be designed for big manufacturers — heavy implementations, configuration-heavy, expensive. For SMBs (£1m-£20m revenue), bespoke MES is increasingly viable. Modern web frameworks plus AI for the variable bits (vision QC, drawing extraction, conversational interfaces) means a custom MES can be built in 12-20 weeks for £30-£80k — competitive with off-the-shelf annual subscriptions and a much better fit for the actual workflow.
We built a bespoke MES for Kingsland Fabrications covering an 8-stage production workflow with AI integration throughout — drawing-to-BOM, supplier ordering, customer scheduling, QC inspection, conversational shop-floor assistant, live analytics. The MES is the platform; AI extends what the platform can do.
Real examples
What this looks like in practice.
- Live shop-floor view: every job, every stage, who's working on what, what's late.
- Job tracking: barcode/QR scanning at each production stage logs progress automatically.
- Material reservation: jobs reserve specific stock as they move through the workflow.
- AI-augmented MES: drawing extraction feeds the BOM, vision QC feeds dispatch, conversational assistant queries the live state.
See in action
Where we deliver this for clients.
Related terms
Adjacent concepts.
Apply it
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