MES Features: What MES Software Actually Does on the Shop Floor

MES software records what happens on the shop floor as it happens. This guide covers the six MES features a UK discrete manufacturer uses every day: job tracking, clocking on and off, live WIP, downtime reasons, traceability and job costing. It is written for a CNC machining business, fabrication shop or assembly operation weighing up shop floor tracking software and wanting to know what each feature does in practice.

If you want the definition first, read what is a manufacturing execution system? This article assumes you know the basics and looks at the features themselves, with examples from manufacturers running them.

Not sure which system you need? Read our guide: MRP vs MES vs ERP: which do UK manufacturers need?

Job tracking is the feature everything else depends on. Each work order carries a barcode or appears on a touchscreen at the workstation. When an operator scans it, the system records which operation started, at which workstation, and when. When they finish, it records the completion and how many parts passed.

That gives planners and supervisors a live status for every job without walking the floor. A customer asks where their order is, and the answer is on screen: second operation of four, started at 10:40.

At Kal Tire’s UK retreading facility, which makes retread tyres up to 49 inches, production was tracked on paper and spreadsheets. DynamxMFG now captures shop floor data automatically and keeps a live and historic record for every tyre, with work instructions shown at each workbench. Decisions are made on real data rather than assumptions.

Clocking in a MES does two jobs. Attendance clocking records when people arrive and leave. Job clocking records which job each person is working on, so labour hours land against the right work order instead of being estimated at the end of the week.

The value is in what it removes. Operators stop filling in time sheets and job cards, and nobody has to type handwritten times into a spreadsheet.

The Albion Knitting Company, a London knitwear manufacturer with a multilingual workforce, replaced handwritten work cards and job sheets with barcode scanning and on-screen visual instructions on TotalControlPro’s legacy platform. They recovered approximately 30 minutes of productive time per person per day, and production output reports became instant.

Once jobs are tracked at each operation, work in progress stops being a guess. A live WIP view shows which jobs are running, which are queued at each workstation, which are late and where work is piling up. Bottlenecks show up while you can still do something about them.

It also helps teams downstream. Gloucestershire Machining Centre tracks jobs from CAD to machining to dispatch, with live updates for planners and operators. With minute-level, part-specific visibility, team leaders act on current data, and GMC increased production capacity by 40% with the same team and setup.

When a job stops, the operator picks a reason on the terminal: waiting for material, machine fault, waiting for inspection, missing drawing. The stoppage is timed from that moment until work restarts.

Over a few weeks, those reason codes turn complaints into numbers. You can see which stoppages cost the most hours, on which machines, and fix the biggest first instead of the loudest.

Silverstone Composites, which makes composite components for motorsport, had no way to pinpoint stoppages caused by miscommunication, delays or stock shortages while it ran on paper. After digitising its process on TotalControlPro’s legacy MES platform, the laminating team can see what is being worked on at the cutting station and when to start, and the business can see which stages use the most resources.

Every scan in a MES is logged with a timestamp and operator ID. Link that to material batches, serial numbers and inspection results and you get a full history for each part: which material went in, who worked on it, when it was inspected and what the result was. For aerospace, defence and other regulated work, that record is a requirement, and it builds itself as operators work.

Protea builds high-precision gas analysers to exact specifications, where component-level traceability and serialisation are critical. DynamxMFG lets them add or remove items from work orders after release, scrap and rework parts, and keep a complete audit trail throughout. Andrew Toy, their Managing Director, called dynamic BOM changes after release the single biggest improvement for the business.

Job costing comes almost free once jobs and labour are tracked. The system already knows how long each operation took and who did it, so it can compare actual time and cost with the estimate on every job and every part.

That shows which jobs make money and which quietly lose it, and it gives estimators real times to quote from next time. Paul Bland, Managing Director at GMC, put it this way: “DynamxMFG enabled us to monitor machine time and see whether we’re making a profit or loss on each component.”

These MES features sit alongside your accounts package, quoting tools and any ERP or MRP system rather than replacing them. Work orders come in from planning, and completion, time and scrap data go back out.

Spanwall Facades, a sheet metal fabricator for building facades, ran on paper that followed products between processes. DynamxMFG integrated with their group-level ERP and gave the shop floor the visibility it lacked. Finance can now pull data and produce reports at the press of a button, and over two years Spanwall introduced full traceability and tracking.

You do not need every feature on day one. Most manufacturers start with job tracking and clocking, because every other feature depends on that data. Live WIP and downtime reasons follow straight away, since they use the same scans. Traceability and detailed job costing can be switched on once operators are used to scanning.

If you run five or ten jobs at a time and can see all of them from your desk, a whiteboard may still be enough. Once supervisors spend their day chasing job status, or a customer query takes 20 minutes to answer, you have outgrown manual tracking.

DynamxMFG is a MES built for UK SME discrete manufacturers. Operators use barcode scanning or touchscreen terminals to start and finish operations, clock on to jobs and record stoppages. Planners and supervisors see live dashboards of running, waiting and late jobs, with job costing, traceability and reporting built on the same data. It integrates with existing ERP and accounting packages.

Book a short demo of DynamxMFG to see how it fits your shop floor. We’ll show you how the system would work with your actual production processes, using examples from your own operation.

• Job tracking comes first. Scanning jobs at each operation gives a live status for every order and feeds every other feature.
• Clocking puts labour against the job. Hours land on the right work order, and time sheets and handwritten job cards go.
• Live WIP shows bottlenecks as they form. Planners see what is running, queued and late at each workstation without walking the floor.
• Downtime reasons turn stoppages into numbers. Timed reason codes show which problems cost the most hours.
• Traceability builds itself. Every scan is logged with a timestamp and operator ID, linked to materials and inspection results.
• Manufacturing job costing compares actual with estimate. You see profit or loss on each job and part, and quote from real times.