Category: MES
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How to Know if Your MES is Costing You $150,000 Per Hour (And What to Do About It)
ARTICLE SUMMARY: Most manufacturers only think about MES “cost” in terms of license fees, integrator invoices, and infrastructure, but that is rarely where the real money goes missing. The real cost shows up in the hours when production is down, blind, or running on tribal knowledge because MES is offline, misconfigured, or simply not trusted by the…
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From Proficy Pioneers to TPG’s New Industrial Stack: Why We’re Fired Up at Rain Engineering
Update March 24, 2026: The official name is now Velotic; earlier versions of this article noted that no official name had been announced. If you’ve known Rain Engineering (ENG) for a while, you know us as the Proficy people. We were building and supporting Proficy MES, HMI/SCADA, and historian projects back when it was still…
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The Deal Is Done: What TPG’s $600M Proficy Bet Means Now
Six months ago, I wrote about TPG’s audacious $600 million bet on Proficy. I called it what it was: a massive vote of confidence that manufacturing execution systems would be critical competitive differentiators in the coming decade. Today, the deal closed. Proficy is officially independent. TPG owns it. GE Vernova’s out. And everything I predicted? It’s already happening, faster than I expected. If you’re a manufacturer who’s been watching from…
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Beyond “Smart Factory” Hype: The 2026 Playbook for MES That Actually Delivers
ARTICLE SUMMARY There is no shortage of noise heading into 2026… AI on every conference agenda. “Smart factory” in every vendor deck. “Do more with less” in every corporate memo. Yet on the plant floor, leaders are still juggling the same chronic headaches: lines that will not stay up, quality issues that appear out of…
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Breaking Down the Barriers: Why Shop Floor Connectivity Is Mission-Critical for Modern Manufacturers
Industrial manufacturing is undergoing a profound transformation, as competitive pressures, customer demands, and the proliferation of data force facilities to reimagine every aspect of their operations. For many operations leaders, the promise of Industry 4.0 seems distant, largely because their plants remain saddled with siloed information, legacy assets, and processes that simply don’t “talk” to…
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Stop These 3 MES Deployment Mistakes That Bleed Cash and Stall Your Factory
avoid these 3 things when you are connecting shop floor equipment to information systems.