Manufacturing refers to products and services that support the design, production, monitoring, and optimization of industrial and discrete manufacturing operations. This category includes markets that focus on production execution, asset and environmental management, and advanced manufacturing services-enabling organizations to enhance efficiency, quality, sustainability, and innovation across the production lifecycle.
Gartner defines manufacturing execution systems as a specialist class of production-oriented software that manages, monitors and synchronizes the execution of real-time physical processes involved in transforming raw materials into intermediate and/or finished goods. These systems coordinate the execution of work orders with production scheduling and enterprise-level systems like ERP, product life cycle management and quality management systems. MES applications also provide feedback on process performance, and support component and material-level traceability, genealogy and integration with process history, where required.