Solumina MES

Dramatic improvement to manufacturing and quality control and risk mitigation

Comments: Huge. Aside from being paperless for the most part, the ability to quickly find data is the greatest benefit. Next, I would point to the risk reduction for data loss or missing data, as product cannot proceed to subsequent workstations without proper closure. Imagine gathering and copying data from 20 paper records kept in 20 different boxes that were put in long term storage out of state several years ago. Now imagine keying those 20 part identifiers into Solumina for a query and having the data returned in seconds!

Pros:

Once dialed in, it manages inputs and outputs efficiently while providing very fast access to records.

Cons:

I wish the font and icon size was customizable, and the green and red thumbs are tiny and too close together. I wish there were installation templates, or Best Utilization examples that would be useful for determining direction. As it is there is much left to the user, so the expertise of the user's configuration team is key to smooth deployment.

In supporting a difficult process, Solumina delivers sound features and superior customer support.

Comments: consistent manufacturing execution through standardized process plans. Quality of product improvements through integration of lean and SPC tools into the execution system.

Pros:

Far and away, the customer support in working to deliver a robust solution for Manufacturing Execution, Quality Assurance, and management of our Supplier Quality is the number one positive feature of working with iBASEt. They continue to work to address nuances generated by the ways we run our manufacturing environment, and have brought insights and recommendations for improvement that are 'outside' the scope of the software solution they provide.

Cons:

All process planning is '0D' based - text oriented, with any 2D or 3D data that is desired for inclusion or that we want to use as the 'foundation' of process plans merely attachments to the text based plans. If I had to pick a second 'con', it is the inconsistent level of 'client to server' communication which negatively impacts remote users; iBASEt continually updates their code to make remote access better, but often as a result of OUR finding where excessive database calls are made from the client causing repeated 'round trips' to be driven across the WAN.

MES adjusted for Costpoint

Comments: Our company converts Solumina's version of MES to be compatible with Deltek CostPoint and additionally runs it through Citrix Receiver to all our work stations. The multiple layers of connections leaves us with a lot of slow responses and forced logouts. This is likely not really an iBaseT issue, but it's one of the biggest things we struggle with. However, for the most part when it works it works quite well.

Pros:

The software has very good visual interactive displays to present work instructions. The software is also very customizable.

Cons:

Being able to batch work orders together is something we were told was going to be a functionality coming to the software, but successfully being able to use this function hasn't materialized yet.

Solumina is great - 10/10 would use again.

Pros:

In my limited experience (and in the opinion of the team that evaluated various options and selected Solumina as the best), Solumina provides a greater amount of low-cost flexibility and customizability, and G8 offers a much greater out-of-the-box functionality than other commercially available MES.

Cons:

It seems like customizations funded by individual companies are leveraged by Solumina into the next version of the software, but it doesn't appear that there is any type of pricing break for the software update to the customer that funded the development of the additional functionality.

We use this software in our daily business. It has a fantastic suite of capabilities.

Comments: Manufacturing in a paperless environment.

Pros:

The software itself is wonderful. I would highly recommend it to business that need an electronic Work Instructions software. it allows the user to custom build different applications from Quality management to Supplier Quality as a well as Audit. Easy to use for manufacturing and the user interface is incredible.

Cons:

Moving from previous versions is difficult and the migration process is cumbersome. Cusomter support is wonderful though.