Cloud MES - 4 Reasons to Upgrade Your Manufacturing Strategy

In the Gartner® 2025 Market Guide for Manufacturing Execution Systems, they highlight evaluating MES cloud strategy as a way for manufacturing leaders to stay ahead of legacy systems.

As seen in the above figure, cloud adoption continues to climb steadily. GE Vernova's Proficy Smart Factory Cloud MES is a powerful production and quality management solution that speeds production and increases consistency. This cloud-based solution manages process, discrete (non-serialized & serialized) and mixed-mode production operations by providing insight into how products flow through the plant and integrating quality control.

This blog explores four reasons you should consider adopting Cloud as part of your MES strategy.

"Along with cloud improvements, architectures that focus on edge components can further mitigate risk."

While security concerns are often cited as a barrier to cloud MES adoption, many cloud providers offer robust security measures that can exceed those available in traditional on-premise systems. This includes advanced encryption, regular security updates, and compliance with industry standards. Proficy Smart Factory Cloud MES and Proficy Historian are hosted on AWS Azure -- a hyperscaler that enables manufacturers to focus less on security and more on their actual production.

"Hyperscaler growth is allowing the providers to improve their distributed platforms as well, meaning the latency will continue getting better as manufacturers’ data gets closer to the factories."

Cloud services allow manufacturers to easily scale their operations up or down, aligning with demand fluctuations without the need for significant capital investment in infrastructure. With Proficy Smart Factory Cloud MES, it's easy to stand up a MES fast. Our MES is 80% "out-of-the-box" and 20% composable based on your needs using our no-code development environment.

"These [Hyperscaler] architectures also can provide a layer of flexibility with your manufacturing data. For example, high-volume, low-latency time series data can be processed and analyzed at the edge, while only aggregates or contextualized and filtered results are sent to the cloud, reducing the cost and complexity of your cloud storage."

By adopting cloud solutions, manufacturers can reduce costs related to IT infrastructure, maintenance, and upgrades. Proficy Smart Factory MES can help reduce manufacturing software costs by 30% while accelerating time-to-value as compared to on-prem solutions.

Gartner describes "monitoring production through data collection and reporting of KPIs" as one of the "three key areas" of MES

Cloud solutions facilitate easy access to data from anywhere, fostering improved collaboration among employees, partners, and suppliers. This can lead to enhanced decision-making and more efficient operations.

Proficy Smart Factory MES leverages capabilities from Proficy Historian to:

Read the full Market Guide to learn more

Different roles in the business require different information. Many manufacturers suffer from excessive costs related to materials, labor, packaging, and shipping.

By implementing cloud MES, manufacturers also unlock new ways to combine and view data remotely, compare production & asset performance across multiple plants, and track from the enterprise level to the shop floor. This helps every team make the best decisions based on the best data – faster.

Gartner, Market Guide for Manufacturing Execution Systems, By Jake Cunningham, Christian Hestermann, 5 May 2025

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