Report:

Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems

Top Vendor Products for Manufacturing Execution Systems in 2023

• Critical Manufacturing
• GE Digital
• iTAC Software
• Körber
• Rockwell Automation
• Siemens Digital Industries Software

Manufacturing Execution Systems Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Aegis Software - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical Industry: Aegis has been very successful in the electronics industry. This includes contributing heavily to the direction and content of IPC International's Connected Factory Exchange (IPC-CFX) and donating a software toolkit it developed to expedite development of CFX implementations to the industry via legal transfer of rights to the toolkit to the IPC. IPC-CFX has been adopted by more than 80 equipment suppliers and has been adopted to industrial environments beyond electronics.
  • Product Features: Aegis has interesting product features of note, such as its "automate-to-order" function, which extends traditional engineer-to-order functions to automated creation-of-build instructions and automated manufacturing process flows based on the order content, as well as its own native 3D computer-aided design (CAD) backbone. These capabilities have helped Aegis expand its existing customer base to areas beyond just electronics manufacturing.
  • Customer Experience: Aegis was in the top three in customer experience in the Magic Quadrant, and had the highest Net Promoter Score (93) of all of the vendors in this research based on results from Gartner Peer Insights.

  Cons:

  • Market Awareness: Aegis had one of the lowest Gartner market momentum index (MMI) designations of the MQ participants, as well as the lowest position in marketing execution evaluation in this MQ.
  • MES Architectural Innovation: Adoption of technologies that peer companies have completed (containerized services, SaaS delivery, composable architecture, citizen developer extensions) are not yet available from Aegis. Current cloud implementation is based on virtualization of the existing stack, and not a rearchitecture to take advantage of native cloud capabilities.
  • Partnership Strategy: Aegis does virtually all of its own implementations. We have found that this can create delays and resource shortages in smaller vendors as business grows. We advise clients to get contractual assurances that implementation resources will be available as needed throughout deployment.


• Applied Materials - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical Industry: The Applied SmartFactory portfolio has a breadth and depth of capabilities that support its core markets of semiconductor, display and assembly and test.
  • Product Scope: Its technology platforms are executing manufacturing processes at high-volume factories that run 24/7. Key capability areas include manufacturing execution, process quality, factory productivity and MOM extensions, such as supply chain planning and simulation.
  • Customer Experience: Customer references reported that both product and service reflect professionalism and deep domain expertise in their coverage area.

  Cons:

  • Industry Limitations: The Applied SmartFactory portfolio is very specific to semiconductor and display manufacturing, and is unlikely to be a good fit outside of those specific domains. Though Applied has customers in the pharmaceutical space, it has no plans to do full MES in pharma.
  • Solution Complexity: The Applied Materials SmartFactory solution consists of more than a dozen products, most of which have been acquired over the years. Applied Materials have invested in a user experience team, which is building the same UI across all the offerings. Clients evaluating Applied Materials should evaluate how the different UIs will impact the user community.
  • Architectural Innovation: While its current offerings are based on service bus technology, development of containerization/microservices capabilities are underway. However, the experience of other vendors in this space shows this is likely three or more years out.


• Apprentice.io - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Platform: The MES platform hosts multiple sites on a consolidated (logically single instance) system, but allows local flexibility in upgrade cycles, which is a benefit to LS manufacturers where upgrading a system cannot be disruptive.
  • MES Innovation: In conjunction with one of its large LS clients, Apprentice is creating a multienterprise MES capability for managing detailed manufacturing processes and data decision making between sponsors and contract manufacturers.
  • Compliance Innovation: To remove a stumbling block for cloud technology in LS, Apprentice is leveraging updated FDA guidance on computer software assurance (CSA) with "risk-based CSA validation." As part of its product build, it incorporates validation needs as core processes in its auditable software development life cycle (SDLC). A third-party LS compliance specialist validates the new release and documents it for customers, reducing or eliminating the need for additional validation work by the customers.

  Cons:

  • Accelerated Growth: Apprentice has moved rapidly from electronic batch records (EBRs) to MES to laboratory execution systems to multienterprise MES in less than five years. This pace may not be sustainable.
  • International Support: Apprentice has added a handful of resources outside of North America (notably in Ireland and India), but will need to continue to add service and support resources to support its rapid growth.
  • Product and Integration: Customer references still show concerns about time and effort to connect Tandem Virtual Collaboration (part of Apprentice's Tempo Manufacturing Cloud) to production equipment, especially newer equipment that it may not have encountered before.


• AVEVA - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Core Technology: AVEVA continues to advance its manufacturing data management and analytics functionality by leveraging the company's cloud-based solutions. Manufacturers can now use the cloud-native AVEVA Data Hub to create a centralized data repository combining data from AVEVA MES with data from on-premises AVEVA PI Servers and any other relevant sources into an easily scaled, single data source.
  • Vertical/Industry Strategy: AVEVA MES has a strong position in the food and beverage industry, and is also found in consumer products. These two industries account for nearly half of its customer base. AVEVA is also leveraging the PI customer base to grow MES business in the specialty chemicals market.
  • Innovative Partnerships: AVEVA is continuing to advance its offerings with collaboration through partnerships, adding TwinThread for advanced analytics/artificial intelligence (AI), and NEC for MES market growth in Japan.

  Cons:

  • Product: Reviewers have commented about the number of configuration and diagnostic tools required to implement and maintain the various components of the AVEVA system. AVEVA referred to this as the "innovator's dilemma" — that is, how to advance the product suite while continuing to support existing user environments.
  • Business Strategy: The acquisition of AVEVA by Schneider Electric may not change short-term business strategy. However, manufacturing operations software (including MES) will be less than 20% of the combined software revenue of Schneider Electric. In addition, the combination has the potential to create complexity across product lines. Clients evaluating AVEVA MES software should investigate and understand the long-term plans in the Schneider Electric context.
  • Sales Execution: We have had Gartner clients and Peer Insights reviewers mention a lack of coordination between AVEVA and its implementation partners during contract negotiations, presenting a confusing and disjointed view to the end customer. Clear points of communication must be established upfront to prevent misunderstandings.


• Critical Manufacturing - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: The Critical Manufacturing MES has strong data management, analytics and extended MES capability, especially for semiconductor and medical devices. Its modern platform manages both IoT and transactional MES data in the same data model.
  • Marketing Execution: As a smaller vendor, Critical Manufacturing is continuously expanding its partner and SI ecosystem. This is supported by growing internal resources by more than 40% in one year.
  • Customer Satisfaction: Critical Manufacturing continues to enjoy higher customer satisfaction evaluations than most vendors in this research. Customers especially value the approachability and responsiveness of Critical Manufacturing's staff.

  Cons:

  • Service Delivery: Critical Manufacturing's high growth in customer adoption and the addition of internal and external resources could lead to a loss of control over quality. Customers need to ensure they'll get the resources they need for deployment and support when they need it.
  • Product or Service: While Critical Manufacturing is improving its technology and making upgrades easier, customers do not move to newer versions at a very fast pace. Critical Manufacturing should take a more proactive approach to help its customers adopt newer versions and make use of all the product enhancements.
  • Innovation: Innovations in composability and low-code are well underway, and are mainly focused on analytics functions today. Rearchitecting the core execution functionality is yet to be finalized.


• Dassault Systèmes - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing Execution: DELMIA Apriso has strong name recognition and market acceptance. This is evidenced by its appearance in many MES selection processes Gartner has assisted in and the relatively large number of "go-lives" reported to us during our Magic Quadrant review.
  • Product Strategy: DELMIA Apriso is well-regarded for its high level of configurability across discrete manufacturing and batch/repetitive flow manufacturing disciplines. The addition of Production Execution offers clients an MES environment without the complexity (and price) of DELMIA Apriso. This will allow Dassault to provide a segmented approach to enterprise customers that have both large, complex plants, and smaller sites that do not need the same level of complexity in their MES solution.
  • Marketing Strategy: Dassault Systèmes continues to leverage acquisitions and its 3DEXPERIENCE platform to provide global manufacturers with MOM capability, including supply chain scheduling and warehouse management, and integration to its engineering solutions (CAD/computer-aided manufacturing [CAM] and PLM), and augmented reality support via Diota, which was acquired by Dassault and has been integrated with DELMIA Apriso.

  Cons:

  • Innovation: It is imperative that the DELMIA Apriso product team continues to evolve the architecture of its on-premises, highly configurable to keep pace with the newest technology trends, or it risks falling behind the pace of the market.
  • Sales Execution/Pricing: Gartner clients have reported that DELMIA Apriso's resource-based licensing model limits expansion and deployment in further facilities. Dassault has stated its new 3DEXPERIENCE cloud roles will follow the standard 3DEXPERIENCE named user licensing model. However, DELMIA Apriso will continue with the current licensing model for on-premises or a cloud provider of the customers' choice.
  • Implementation Strategy: The strategy shared with Gartner included both a continuation of user roles, and a "Composable App Framework." Its interpretation of composability is effectively a configurable BPM tool. It differs from Gartner's composability definition, as it is not granular enough and does not include an open/public marketplace.


• GE Digital - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: GE Digital was one of the first MES/automation vendors to embrace new microservices technologies to meld MES and IIoT capabilities. Its 2023 version (released in November 2022), includes cloud versions of its manufacturing operations platform (historian, analytics, manufacturing execution and operations hub).
  • Product Strategy: GE Digital is one of very few MES vendors to offer support for multiple manufacturing modes from a single application. Its vision includes supporting circularity and sustainability, starting with storing energy data in the MES, contextualized with other order data to help customers make better energy decisions based on actual performance.
  • Business Operations: GE Digital is investing in sales and service resources. In August 2022, it announced a deeper alliance with longtime partner EY to help organizations improve productivity through data-driven manufacturing. This alliance is intended to improve quality of services while providing on-time results and reduce operating and maintenance costs for common customers.

  Cons:

  • New Technology Platform: While GE Digital has made enormous strides in the conversion of Proficy Smart Factory (MES) to microservices/containerized applications, it is now reworking some of the basic infrastructure. While this may be a valuable step, it further delays completion. It also has additional work in migrating older Microsoft-based services.
  • Product Migration: Some clients and customer references have reported that there is no clear path from older customized versions of Proficy Plant Applications and Proficy for Manufacturing Discrete (PfMD) to the new Proficy Smart Factory (MES). We recommend developing a clear understanding of how customizations can be migrated to the new platform going forward.
  • Infrastructure Support: Clients who choose to implement GE Digital's offering on-premises and are unfamiliar with support of newer technologies such as Docker Swarm have been surprised at the added IT burden of supporting a more complex infrastructure. GE Digital plans to address some of this complexity with a fully cloud-native Kubernetes-based offering at the end of 2023.


• Honeywell - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Industry Focus: Honeywell continues to pursue opportunities in life sciences and battery and photovoltaic cell manufacturing with the new Manufacturing Excellence Platform, as well as building on its core expertise in oil and gas and specialty chemicals.
  • Product Strategy: The launch of the Manufacturing Excellence Platform has ushered in new capabilities including no-code/low-code template libraries, and new capabilities in process order and creation, inventory management, batch visualization, analytics and reporting. Honeywell has also adopted an "API-first" methodology in its software development criteria for upgrading its portfolio. This is one of the key requirements for composability.
  • User Experience (UX): Honeywell is now taking a "persona based" approach for UI/UX development. This can reduce the implementation effort and training, and help customers standardize.

  Cons:

  • Customer Experience: Honeywell has made progress on UI improvements, but it is not complete across all product modules. For example, no-code/low-code capability is mainly available in its mobility apps and industry templates. Customers will have to accept multiple levels of UI sophistication across the platform.
  • Product Execution: Customer reviewers have reported upgrade difficulties and general concerns about the slow speed of innovation. This leads to additional disruption and time lost in the upgrade process.
  • Customer Support and Operations: Honeywell acknowledged our caution on support from previous years' Magic Quadrants. However, improvement is still warranted based on our conversations with customers/clients.


• iBASEt - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical/Industry Strategy: iBASEt's Solumina has a long, successful track record of providing MES functionality tailored for complex discrete assembly, and is targeted at aerospace, defense, nuclear and other highly regulated industries in complex discrete manufacturing. It is also seeing success in satellite launch-related businesses.
  • Customer Support and Operations: iBASEt offers preconfigured solutions for complex manufacturing scenarios. It is expanding its collaboration with additional global SIs and resellers to build its global reach and range. Forty percent of implementations are supported by partners.
  • Customer Adoption: After initial success with its cloud-based iSeries in midmarket accounts, iBASEt now reports some of its large customers have migrated some of their operations to iSeries.

  Cons:

  • Technology Progression: The rollout of web-UI in iSeries to additional iBASEt applications is not complete. The same is true for low-code/no-code capability. Manufacturers need to check if the roadmap is in line with their requirements.
  • Global Market Presence: iBASEt's customer base is predominantly in North America. Companies in other regions need to ensure that local implementation and support resources are sufficient for their needs.
  • Customer Service: Due to high demand for iSeries, as well as migration demand for older Solumina G-Series customers, Gartner has seen lower-than-expected customer reviews.


• iTAC Software - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical/Industry Strategy: The integration between iTAC and its parent company, the Dürr Group, has helped to build enhancements in UI and equipment connectivity by bundling resources and coordinating development efforts between Dürr, iTAC and Cogiscan.
  • Innovation: iTAC's philosophy of a turnkey integration between MES and its edge IIoT platform supports its main industries well. Embedded transport management is another strength.
  • Usability: UI has been standardized, and works well in PC, tablet and especially mobile configurations, as evidenced by live demonstrations and customer reviews.

  Cons:

  • Integration to Business Applications: ERP integration is primarily for SAP ERP, and iTAC's roadmap date for supporting S/4HANA (via SAP Reliable Messaging [RM]) is late 2023. There is no current commitment to SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). Customers using other ERPs or different PLMs need to use less standardized integrations.
  • Architecture Innovation: The decomposition of legacy iTAC versions is underway, and iTAC version 11.0 added nine additional microservices to the set of 11 previously available. No final end date to get to a fully composable architecture with more granular components was given.
  • Market Responsiveness/Record: After making strong investments into the solution, iTAC should take a more proactive approach to help its customers adopt newer versions and make use of all the product enhancements.


• Körber - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical/Industry Strategy: Körber's Business Area Pharma has a strong knowledge of the pharmaceutical business and a product that supports this business, including best-practice library templates for the different pharmaceutical, biotech and cell and gene business processes. It received high marks from customer surveys, and Gartner inquiry for domain expertise in pharmaceutical processes and valuable consulting.
  • Innovation: Körber has added a no-code master batch record (MBR) designer with a drag-and-drop capability based on a set of reusable objects for MBR and recipe simulation. Werum PAS-X Savvy has introduced an "integrated process model" (IPM) to reduce the number of experiments in the process development phase, by creating and managing a digital twin of the production process.
  • Implementation and Training: It has also leveraged its internal expertise via implementation and training offerings. These include an MBR Studio service, and Körber's Pharma Academy including Werum PAS-X Learn, a digital solution for learning, development and upskilling.

  Cons:

  • User Experience: Körber has been slow to improve its UI/UX. Clients and customer reviewers have voiced concern with the lack of progress.
  • Enterprise Integration Technology: Körber lags behind most vendors in this space in enterprise integration technology (e.g., ERP, supply chain management).
  • Geographic Coverage: While meeting our inclusion criteria (>20% of customers outside of home territory), roughly half of its customers are headquartered in EMEA.


• Oracle - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic Presence: The global presence of Oracle and its ecosystem of 75+ partners make Oracle Fusion Cloud Manufacturing attractive for customers independent of location.
  • Product or Service: Oracle continues to add capabilities found in more sophisticated MES solutions, such as operator skills qualification, revision control and work order release through e-record/e-signature.
  • Application Integration: As a part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle Fusion Cloud Manufacturing offers a similar UI, a joint data model and an integration with other products from Oracle's cloud portfolio. Oracle provides REST services as part of its extensible application platform.

  Cons:

  • Vertical Industry Adoption: Oracle has added functionality for mixed-mode manufacturing, but Gartner analysts have not seen enough adoption by customers in these industries to verify effectiveness.
  • Target Market: Oracle's go-to-market strategy focuses on Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management Applications users, and integration with other Oracle on-premises solutions is not supported out of the box.
  • Customer Experience: Reference customers interviewed in 2022 were using some functions of Oracle Supply Chain Execution Cloud, but rarely core MES beyond order management. Additional product functionality for manufacturing is available across multiple Oracle offerings (Oracle IoT Intelligent Applications Cloud, Oracle Supply Chain Execution Cloud, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Quality Management to name a few). Clients evaluating Oracle Fusion Cloud Manufacturing should make sure they understand the scope of Oracle product offerings and customer reference use cases.


• Parsec Automation - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Technology Foundation: Parsec has completed its product migration to .NET core and now offers container-native cloud MES, edge MES and hybrid MES with its TrakSYS product line.
  • Geographic Strategy: Although one of the smallest vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Parsec (supported by its channel partners) is one of only two vendors in this research that has at least 10% of its customers headquartered in each of the four global regions. It also has the second-largest percentage of clients in Latin America. It has enhanced this coverage by adding global implementation partners for enterprise deployment.
  • Customer Experience: Parsec has the highest percentage of customers with more than five plants in production and the lowest percentage of on-premises implementations, not including the cloud-only vendors. This is due in part to its single-instance/multisite deployment capability, but also in its ease of implementation and highly rated user experience.

  Cons:

  • Product Architecture: Forms-base low-code capability is part of the TrakSYS solution, available for table and entity configuration, reports/analytics and UI formatting.
  • Hosting Options: Parsec also describes its deployment models as software as a service/platform as a service (SaaS/PaaS), but the SIMS enterprise customers are almost exclusively private cloud, not on a multitenant instance, nor are they updated at the same time. Manufacturers that are interested in the multitenant SaaS deployment should be aware that they might be early adopters.
  • Sales Execution and Pricing: Parsec has a very flexible, extensible and scalable licensing and pricing model, but it is very complex compared to most of its competition. This sentiment has been echoed by Peer Insights reviews, client inquiry and proposal reviews undertaken by the authors of this research.


• Rockwell Automation - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product Portfolio: The Rockwell portfolio provides a choice between highly customizable on-premises solutions and a configurable public cloud solution, but for core MES, it is either one or the other.
  • Vertical/Industry Strategy: The combination of Plex and Rockwell capabilities and vertical expertise is showing initial benefits to common customers in multiple industries. First customers report joint deployments of FactoryTalk and Plex MES (i.e., by using Plex's quality management capabilities with FactoryTalk).
  • Go-to-Market Strategy: The addition (and promotion) of Plex software industry veterans to executive positions in Rockwell has helped to turn last year's weakness into a strength. Its go-to-market and product strategy are clear and focused.

  Cons:

  • Platform: The Plex multitenant SaaS architecture does not provide all of the services required of a PaaS, which would be necessary to be a unified platform for all of Rockwell's future development.
  • Product Convergence: Rockwell's prospects will need to be careful not to get confused about overlapping products in the Rockwell portfolio. Rockwell's roadmap will have to address the overlaps in technology and industry coverage.
  • Global Presence: Even with the combined company, new client acquisition of the Plex cloud MES solution is still predominantly in North America. More international expansion has yet to materialize.


• SAP - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: SAP DM's solution architecture includes edge capabilities (based on Microsoft Azure Stack Edge) from the start, which is mandatory for a public cloud MES in most environments (latency, loss of connection). The Production Process Designer and the BTP-based extensibility offer a good vision for low-code capabilities and eventually composability. In addition, SAP DM's hybrid MES architecture supports process, batch and discrete manufacturing.
  • Market Understanding: SAP has taken a step toward addressing supply chain convergence with the planning, logistics and manufacturing product organizations now combined. This should make meeting client needs for supply chain coordination easier due to the intragroup integration and coordination.
  • Go-to-Market Strategy: SAP's innovation hubs and approximately 80 partners with test and demo licenses support global sales and implementations. SAP DM is available across AWS and Microsoft Azure in Europe and the U.S., and through Alibaba in the Chinese mainland.

  Cons:

  • Product Maturity: SAP DM is growing in adoption and acceptance, but has not reached the maturity level of SAP's Manufacturing Suite (consisting of Manufacturing Execution [ME], Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence [MII], and Plant Connectivity [PCo]). In most industry segments, only a limited number of customers are live, so prospects need to check for functional completeness for their specific use cases and the availability of experienced resources for implementation.
  • Delivery Model: SAP DM delivers quarterly releases, so customers need to be prepared for the rapid changes to a critical manufacturing solution. As with many cloud enterprise applications, standardization and minimization of customizations are key to success.
  • Legacy Migration: Gartner has not seen a migration path that would allow easy like-for-like migrations from SAP ME to SAP DM. SAP customers who have used SAP MII to extend the process manufacturing capabilities in SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and S/4HANA will need to work with SAP and their partner ecosystem on a migration path. The same is true for the migration from SAP MII to newer integration technology like SAP BTP to build the necessary data and control flows.


• Sepasoft - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Sales Execution/Pricing: The Sepasoft per-server pricing model is rare in the MES space. Most competitors charge by user, resource or data tag, or have some sort of usage monitoring. Sepasoft charges per server, with no limitations on number of users, connections or data tags. This gives Sepasoft a license cost advantage over most competitors.
  • Production Equipment Integration: By virtue of the underlying Ignition platform, Sepasoft MES can integrate production equipment down to individual PLC commands, which is very valuable in process manufacturing industries.
  • Implementation Support: Sepasoft provides Quick Start Program (QSP) for new customers not using MES Certified integrators, as well as design consultants to help both integrators and end customers.

  Cons:

  • Application Modernization: The Sepasoft MES solution shows minimal cloud deployments, and incomplete adoption of HTML5 and incomplete integration between its workflow engine and individual components.
  • International Presence: Sepasoft only covers the U.S. and Canada directly, using global distributors and SIs for other regions. The multilanguage functions are limited to what is available in the Ignition platform.
  • Target Market: The Sepasoft MES system is built on top of the Ignition platform from Inductive Automation. Clients who may not wish to have the Ignition platform as part of their infrastructure should consider this before choosing Sepasoft.


• Siemens Digital Industries Software - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Offering (Product) Strategy: Opcenter Execution provides MES capability across multiple discrete, process and hybrid industries. Siemens' vision includes a roadmap of cloud-ready, easy-to-configure/extend solutions made up of modules able to run stand-alone or interconnected, and configured/extended to meet customer requirements.
  • Customer Experience: Siemens users gave the UI, system flexibility and system stability high marks in customer reviews. Siemens, more than other vendors that have grown via acquisition, has worked to harmonize and standardize its UI, regardless of the genealogy of the application, and customers are taking notice.
  • Supply Chain Strategy: Siemens continues to expand its supply chain coverage, notably with its collaboration with Siemens Digital Logistics in a joint effort (Opcenter Intraplant Logistics) enabling continuous material replenishment flows in the production facility, orchestrating commissioning, material transport and yard/warehouse operations.

  Cons:

  • Product: Siemens' strategy is to provide tailored MOM solutions per industry to reduce implementation and support complexity. As of this research, this strategy has been applied to solutions for semiconductor, electronics, medical device and diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals/biotech. All other industries are served by MES offerings for discrete manufacturing or process manufacturing, with industry-specific functionality provided by a combination of Siemens implementation tools (Xcelerator/Mendix), plus Siemens and third-party implementation provider expertise.
  • Ease of Upgrade: The most common criticisms about the Siemens Opcenter product set are in the areas of complex and time-consuming upgrade processes, and lack of clear communication for both implementation and documentation.
  • Sales Execution/Pricing: Siemens has joined the ranks of vendors that are attempting to move existing clients from perpetual licensing to subscription-based licensing. Customers should review these proposals carefully. Consider the expected life span of the MES when calculating TCO for one-time perpetual license and maintenance costs versus the life cycle cost of the subscription.


• Tulip - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic Strategy: Tulip constantly enhances its platform for more international use and builds out its global delivery capacity with direct presence and partner resources. More than 50% of the customer base is now outside North America.
  • Innovation: Tulip offers the most composable platform for MES that we see in the market. Its library reportedly consists of hundreds of apps and a strong low-code/no-code democratized development environment, giving business technologists a lot of flexibility to design and adapt the solutions according to their individual needs.
  • Production Equipment Integration: Customers have reported that Tulip's edge devices are capable and relatively inexpensive, which allowed them to standardize across heterogeneous equipment.

  Cons:

  • Customer Experience: Tulip's platform is updated every two weeks, with its more flexible LTS option of three to six months for highly regulated industries. Customers need to check if they can accommodate for this fast pace of change.
  • Deployment Model: Tulip is a 100% cloud platform. Companies interested in Tulip should check the options for private cloud deployments if they require full-time availability and greater levels of control.
  • Implementation and Scaling: The flexibility of Tulip's apps concept and the proliferation of apps calls for governance implemented by end-user organizations. Discipline and strong governance are critical to succeed with Tulip's apps model, which is different from more traditional IT-guided models, especially when considering scaling apps to an enterprise. Customers should check Tulip's Enterprise Adoption program.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems, 26 April 2023, ID G00773954

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