Dry Detail s First

Over the past decade, Forbes has reported that up to 84% of companies fail when implementing a digital transformation. In manufacturing, the backbone of that transformation is your MES. And typical MES's are notoriously complex monsters. So, that failure rate? Not shocking.

But let's dispense with the usual litany of bullet points regurgitated by most purveyors of MES systems to explain deployment failure. To be clear, MES deployments do not fail solely because of a customer's lack of clarity regarding the system, low adoption rates post-deployment, time-to-implement issues, low executive buy-in, or incompatible company culture.

These are, however, some of the convenient excuses they'll use to blame you when the deployment crashes like a car with no brakes and your cash is burning along with your sanity.

So why do they fail? For high-tech applications, MES deployments fail when you're dealing with a vendor that doesn't have the domain expertise to comprehend your actual needs, and whose solution isn't flexible enough to address the changing demands of the industries they don't understand.

After all, an MES designed for manufacturing furniture or bottling soda simply isn't going to be able to serve the complexities of an advanced electronics plant environment, no matter how slick the marketing materials are, or how many times someone in sales promised you that it will.

And when an MES deployment fails, the financial impact will be substantial, from sunk costs in software and infrastructure, to lost production time and revenue. But the effects can go way beyond that. Inaccurate data and compliance issues can cause serious headaches, especially in regulated industries.

Here's the cool part. All of the above? Doesn't apply to us. In 15 years, we've never had a failed deployment. Not once. Not ever. And we don't intend to start now. From semiconductor wafer to back-end, advanced packaging to PCBA, final assembly to test. We've got you covered. Flawlessly.

Let's dig into why most typical Manufacturing Execution Systems become monsters, and how we can help you avoid inviting a monster into your factory in the first place.

The MES Frankensystem

There's likely a beast in the server room: your MES. Or rather, your MES Frankensystem. Chances are, it's a many-headed creature, cobbled together from parts of individual systems that were never meant to live under the same roof, let alone be part of the same body.

Most often, it's the result of a global tech giant playing Pokemon with small software companies, acquiring them for market share and gluing their solutions together. This leaves customers with bloated systems that technically integrate, but functionally frustrate. Platforms get "refactored" to apply to new markets that the corporate overlords don't understand. And then they fail, your team will get the blame, instead of the system that was never built for your team to begin with.

It's always fun -- I mean crazymaking -- to watch an MES built for gluing chair legs play dress-up in a blue smock and try to manage micron-level tolerances in semiconductor fabs. With a few renamed database fields, it's paraded into conference rooms and promised as "industry agnostic." Sure, it can't track a wafer's lifecycle or handle inline metrology, but it does have a nifty module for wood grain pattern optimization. Perfect for your next chip tapeout, presumably.

Going Full-Frankenstein

Here's the thing. When a Frankensystem MES lumbers into a plant, chaos doesn't disappear, or turn to "order". It just gets software wrapped around it.  The modules struggle to communicate, often requiring custom-code-mediation just to pass basic data between scheduling, quality, and production tracking. All for a fee, of course.

These systems might shine in demos and slide decks. But once they hit the floor, they start tripping over the messy reality of production. Instead of streamlining operations, they create new layers of confusion. Only now the error codes come with expensive support contracts.

Meanwhile, the traceability tool thinks its still 1996 and you're asking your QA manager why your lot IDs look like someone rolled their face across the keyboard. Operational excellence was the goal. But what you ended up with is a haunted antique shop, where ever module has a story and none of them end well ... for you.

Welcome to Dr. Victor's Help Desk

Need support for your shiny new monolithic MES? It may claim to be a unified platform. But behind the door labeled Enter at Your Own Risk it's less "integrated system" and more "patchwork quilt sewn in the dark."

So, when you run into a bug pretending to be a feature, or a feature that won't do its job--and you will--you'll reach out for support. But you'll find yourself stuck in a never-ending relay race of 3rd party vendors (or chatbots ... yay!) where nobody wants the baton, knows the software, or even understands how a database works. Five help desks. Four different time zones. Three tickets. Zero answers.

You didn't have anything better to do with your Tuesday, right?

Q: Can We Upgrade Seamlessly? A: 😂

Upgrading your modular MES isn't just risky. It's like doing major repairs on live machines while the line's still running. One "fix" triggers five new issues. And the next thing you know, you'r team is back to manual workarounds while someone suggests a rollback like that won't trigger a QA revolt.

And if you're 27 versions behind? Buckle up. You'll be installing all 27. One by one. Like it's 1997 and you haven't updated Windows 95 since the initial OS install.

At some point, you have to ask if the system is serving you, or if it's the other way around.

Your MES Doesn't Have to Be a Horror Story

If your MES Frankensystem is burning down the operations village, it's time for a change. It's time for a solution built for real manufacturing complexity, without the empty promises, refactoring confusion, support relay-races-to-nowhere, or the haunted middleware.

It's time for Intraratio's platform. There's a reason our deployment success rate is 100%, and our customers are some of the biggest and most complex in the advanced electronics industry.

Our platform is built differently because we've wrestled the MES monster personally, and our domain expertise runs through the entire Intraratio team. Our developers, support specialists, and salespeople are all former engineers, operations managers, and operators on lines that built everything from RFIC's to silicon photonics chipsets.

We've lived the chaos, not just observed it. We know the late nights tuning testers and assembly systems to get product to yield, and sleeping in the lobby so we didn't miss that critical new-customer drop-ship pickup.

So our system is grounded in real manufacturing best practices, with flexibility and scalability integrated throughout. We know your products are going to change, market demands are going to shift, and data collection challenges will just become more complex over time. We believe you should be able to adapt without having to hire expensive outside "experts." 

Your existing manufacturing team are the masters of your operation. They just need the right tools to prove it.

And the main difference between our platform and the other guys'? Despite the immense, built-in complexity, it just works. Intraratio's RunCard MES delivers:

• Real-time visibility and control for advanced manufacturing
• Infrastructure built in to empower your team to take advantage of advancements in automation and AI/ML
• A fully-customizable, full-suite solution; no upselling or "add on" surprises
• Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and shortest payback period (ROI)
• Fully digitized traceability for automated processes and quality management
• Direct integrations to machines and suppliers for automated reporting & alerts, with real-time inventory backflushing
• Scalability and adaptability to any size manufacturing operation, from NPI, high-mix/low-volume to low-mix/high-volume -- available day one.
• Minimal to zero downtime when upgrading -- hot-swappable changes while the factory is running will be your new normal
• Flexible deployment models, on-premises, cloud, or hybrid, all under your control, with zero vendor lock-in and no compromises to performance or security
• Defense-in-depth architecture that complements your IT policies, adding proactive protection layers with a proven record of zero breaches

With Intraratio's platform, you get a system designed to capture, hypercontextualize, and unify your data. So you get full, real-time traceability without the typical patchwork pain. And we've streamlined adoption from day one. No long runway. Just a smooth integration that gets your team back to real work, fast.

Ready to ditch the monster and move from nightmares to operational success? Click below to schedule a demo.