Food manufacturers today face constant pressure to do more with less—improve yield, reduce waste, ensure traceability, and scale across multiple facilities. But without the right digital infrastructure in place, these goals are difficult to achieve. That’s where MES and MOM come into play.

In this post, we’ll explain the difference between Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM)—and why this distinction matters for companies looking to modernize.

We’ll also introduce a free white paper that outlines a proven methodology for implementing MES in food production and showcases real-world results from Cargill and Gedik Piliç.

On March 20, Cargill Thailand hosted CMT / CAT Squared Modernization Day, a technology event promoting to their employees the work Cargill Meats Thailand is doing with CAT Squared and SAP. CAT Squared specializes in developing MES (manufacturing executions systems) that manages a company’s plant floor and interfaces production data into ERP systems like SAP ERP.

For industrial-scale food producers, staying compliant with a patchwork of state, federal, and international regulations is challenging. The State of Alabama requires commercial manufacturing operations like Mar-Jac to maintain National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP) certification on their weighing and measuring instruments. Not only do the scales and other hardware devices themselves need to be certified, but the software reading data from these devices must also conform to the standards of the National Conference on Weights and Measures, ensuring the manufacturer’s data is accurate.

In July, CAT Squared released an update to their SPC software that empowers plant-floor operators with real-time SPC trending data and charts. Production staff can now make adjustments to their plant-floor processes and immediately see how those adjustments impact the quality of the product.

There's serious money at stake if weights and measures are off, even by a little. During a previous implementation, we found that one of our customers was averaging four ounces of giveaway per case of product. On one of their top-selling items, they were giving away $2 per box and were producing thousands of overweight cases each day. This discovery was possible through a combination of our FSQM software and properly calibrated weighing systems that run off our scale interface software. But how can you trust that this data is accurate?

CAT Squared is proud to announce a new partnership with  AIMMS, an award-winning vendor of Prescriptive Analytics software, and UniSoma, a leading provider of Advanced Planning solutions. The partnership will enable AIMMS, UniSoma and CAT Squared to provision prescriptive analytics applications for food processing and production companies.

To maximize profitability, companies must have a firm grasp of what it costs to manufacture and process each product. This becomes increasingly challenging for large companies with thousands of employees and long supply chains or multiple manufacturing plants. This study demonstrates a return on investment of less than just a few months of full integration of CAT Squared's costing system.