Critical Manufacturing MES is based on modern, stable and production-ready architectures. It delivers a comprehensive framework using the latest technologies, facilitating a more holistic approach to the complex manufacturing process.
Download white paperCritical Manufacturing MES is based on modern, stable and production-ready architectures. It delivers a comprehensive framework using the latest technologies, facilitating a more holistic approach to the complex manufacturing process.
Download white paperCritical Manufacturing MES is a modern Manufacturing Execution System built from the ground up on the leading enterprise architectures and technologies in order to provide the best availability, scalability, flexibility, extensibility and low cost of ownership to our customers.
The design of the Critical Manufacturing application framework is based on the following pillars:
State-of-the-art standard integrated components, with strong focus on simplicity and ease of use, deployment and maintenance.
Our flexible and extensible framework provides rich functionality, easy customization and powerful integration, which coupled with a comprehensive set of functional modules allows manufacturers to quickly deploy the system to keep pace with changing business requirements.
A generic manufacturing object model and flexible, customer-defined business rules provide extended support to a wide range of manufacturing scenarios.
Standard, proven and cost effective hardware, working together with a powerful software architecture designed for high-availability, performance and scalability.
Our distributed application follows a three-tier architecture model that provides good partitioning, modularity and scalability vectors:
Designed for the creation of a rich, interactive user experience, web graphical user interfaces have been developed on a cross-browser, cross-platform base for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The user interface is a modern multi-device and multi-platform GUI based on AngularJS (by Google) and TypeScript (by Microsoft). It provides a platform for the future of the Critical Manufacturing MES GUI and can also be extended and customized for other enterprise applications.
Customization:
The business tier implements and exposes all functionalities as services to the outside world. The interface layer supports Web Services among other protocols.
The business workflows are the orchestration layer used to provide higher-level functionality through the coordination of business objects.
The business objects follow a hierarchical object model, which facilitates the development of objects with a common behavior.
Customization:
Designed for the automatic creation of powerful integrated capabilities such as data warehousing, reporting and data-mining. It provides reporting and business intelligence optimized for the runtime system, offloading data as soon as possible to the Operational Data Store (ODS) and to the Data Warehouse (DWH).
Customization:
Critical Manufacturing MES is built on the Microsoft technology stack with the Presentation Tier based on the popular HTML5 standard, providing support for a variety of browsers, platforms and devices.
The usage of Microsoft core technology ensures the highest interoperability and a single point of contact for software related issues. Critical Manufacturing MES uses the following technologies:
HTML5 and Angular JS running on an HTML5 compatible browser
Microsoft .Net Core running on Microsoft Windows Server or Linux (when using Docker or Docker Swarm)
Microsoft SQL Server running on Microsoft Windows Server
Critical Manufacturing MES open and extensible architecture provides seamless integration with any application, system or equipment that provides any type of interface:
The Enterprise Integration module provides bi-directional integration and buffered communication with enterprise level applications such as: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (e.g. SAP or Oracle E-Business) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems (e.g. Oracle Agile).
The Connect IoT module provides connectivity and control for a variety of process, metrology and logistical equipment with native support for SECS/GEM, OPC-UA, OPC-DA, Files (CSV, XML) and Databases.
Applications in general can be integrated by calling the respective APIs. Critical Manufacturing exposes all of its services as REST APIs.
Data can be exported or imported using the ETL capabilities of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
Critical Manufacturing’s distributed architecture allows the complete application to be deployed on a single computer (for non-productive deployments) or in distributed application farms to ensure high-availability and load balancing. The application hardware can be scaled-up and scaled-out as required, according to customer specific needs.
The system can be deployed in several variations depending on the load and scalability requirements, starting from single server.
Hardware can be scaled according to the manufacturing needs, at any time.
The Application Server farms scale up as well as scale out via Network Load Balancing.
Database can be configured in high-availability mode either through fail-over clustering or mirroring.
Critical Manufacturing can be deployed using containers, which provide solid gains in terms of configuration and usability by taking advantage of a mature containerization architecture, such as that supplied by the Docker Engine or Kubernetes.
Container orchestrators abstract the underlying hardware infrastructure, allowing the application to be deployed across multiple physical hosts. This provides almost limitless horizontal scalability as another worker node can be launched and joined to the cluster to accommodate extra load on a particular installation.
