9.1 Overview

Personnel is an important resource in a manufacturing company, if not the most important resource of all. One task of an MES system is to carry out effective and flexible planning of labor capacities for use in production. In a networked production department it is important to include not only installations and machines, orders and qualities in planning and optimization but also to a particular extent labor capacities.

The increasing importance of the "resource" of personnel in the production process has to do with two reasons primarily:

1. Since wage costs and non-wage labor costs are very high in industrial countries they have a great influence on production costs. As the result of the general trend towards globalization and the economic opening up of many countries in the Far East, workers in our latitudes are in direct competition with workers in other countries. To counteract this geographical disadvantage it is important to deploy personnel as effectively as possible.

2. The use of very sophisticated and highly specialized machines calls for a correspondingly high level of qualification on the part of the machine operator. It therefore becomes increasingly necessary to deploy employees on the basis of their capabilities and their knowledge.

Successfully overcoming the challenges which arise from this calls for effective solutions which reflect these requirements. The personnel management domain within an MES system provides tools which permit effective implementation of these tasks. A particularly important role is played here by the seamless integration of the personnel component into the...