Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) Software Reviews 2023 | Gartner Peer Insights

Visual Factory is an excellent MES that has allowed our company to standardize production processes and data collection across several plants in a global organization.

The beauty of VF is that it can be as simple or complex as your organization requires, on a plant by plant basis, with modular licensing so you only pay for what you need. Even within the base offering, there are tons of bells and whistles that you can choose to add as your implementation matures. For example using triggers to send notifications of events on the shop floor is particularly powerful.

The data collection capabilities are top notch and allow you to really dig into what is going on within your assembly lines. Although the native data visualization capabilities are not the most powerful, VF’s REST API support combined with nearly unlimited access to your VF instance’s database tables, allows you to extract any data you could want to another platform, such as Excel or PowerBI. This can then be used for complex data analysis to be shared with the greater organization.

The capabilities for tool and test integration with VF also cannot be understated. In recent versions there was a large overhaul of this system where it moved to using MQTT, which has dramatically improved the flexibility and scalability of the device integrations. The developers of VF have shown that this is a focus point for them and they have been expanding their integration “library” to include many different devices and manufacturers so that the customer’s devices are as near to “plug and play” as possible.

The VF support team is also outstanding. Support for priority issues is nearly immediate, regardless of time zone. They are also happy to accommodate functionality changes and feature requests that improve the software.