April 22, 2015

MES performance test report was released by Critical Manufacturing

PORTO, Portugal, April 23, 2015When selecting a system for applications that can potentially expand, manufacturers need assurance that their manufacturing execution software can cope with future flow changes, automation levels, complexity or volume growth. They need to know that they can add hardware nodes as needed, without risking production downtime or other negative impacts on an urgent scale-up. They also need assurance that the scale-up will not require incurring exorbitant additional expenses such as expensive equipment purchases.

Helping manage complex state changes, material flows and production parameters is the job of the MES system. Performing it effectively could require the granularity to perform transactions faster than 1/100 of a second. To test the performance and scalability of its cmNavigo MES software on hardware typically found on the plant floor rather than in high end test labs, Critical Manufacturing engineers programmed multiple test clients to perform a specified transaction set on a single application server. They then increased the number of application servers from one to four and measured the API transactional writes to each.

Transactions per second (tps) increased almost linearly with each additional application server, starting at 143.10 with the first server and climbing 277.00 to 393.40 to 467.40 tps respectively, with each additional server. Achieving these results with only four modest servers proves that the cmNavigo MES software can cope with a volume of concurrent transactions sufficient for every production facility’s needs, including full-scale semiconductor fabrication.

“We know of no other MES software capable of such granularity and the obtained results are by no means the upper limit,” says Adélio Fernandes, vice president of technology for Critical Manufacturing. ”Even higher performance is achievable by continually reducing message footprint and contention times. We hope this test report will help manufacturers in high volume, complex manufacturing environments such as semiconductor manufacturing evaluate software based on consideration of the potential of their process to grow in volume and their need to scale up quickly.”

Details on the full test are available in a new report now available from Critical Manufacturing, titled “Affordable MES. Performance and Scalability for Time-Critical Industry Environments”.

About Critical Manufacturing

Critical Manufacturing provides innovative software technology and advanced services that empower operations for some of the most advanced manufacturers worldwide. Its new generation Manufacturing Execution System (MES) cmNavigo, built end-to-end on proven Microsoft layers, provides unified flexibility for modeling complex industry requirements, increasing manufacturers’ performance, control and quality. The company is part of the Critical Group, a private group of companies founded in 1998 to provide solutions for mission and business critical information systems.