MES and ERP Integration, From the Shop Floor to NetSuite
Your PLCs know exactly what the line did last shift. Your ERP is still waiting for someone to type it in. HillPoint closes that gap so production data moves on its own.
Your plant floor and your business systems don't talk
Your controls already know everything that happens on the line. The PLC counts every part and times every cycle. It logs every fault and the reason each machine stopped. Your ERP knows the other half of the business: the orders, the inventory, the purchase orders, the cost of what you build. In most plants there's nothing connecting the two except a person with a clipboard who keys numbers into a screen at the end of the shift.
That person is your integration layer, and it's slow and wrong more often than anyone admits. MES is the software layer that replaces the clipboard. It reads the real numbers off your PLCs as they happen and passes them up to the ERP, and it passes work orders, part specs, and schedules back down to the floor. Manufacturing execution system is the long name. What it does is make the plant floor and the business run off one set of numbers instead of two.
When that link is missing, your ERP is running on yesterday's guesses. Inventory on the screen doesn't match what's on the rack. The scheduler plans around a count somebody wrote down at 6 a.m. Month-end close turns into three days of detective work, reconciling what the floor actually did against what the system thinks it did. MES integration is how you stop guessing.
NetSuite to the shop floor, an integration almost nobody does
Here's the part almost nobody in the controls world will touch. NetSuite runs a big slice of mid-market manufacturing, and it's cloud ERP, so there's no server in your building to plug into the old way. Most integrators grew up on on-prem SAP and Oracle. Ask them to land shop floor data into NetSuite and you get a blank look or a quote for six figures of custom development.
NetSuite integration isn't exotic. NetSuite exposes a REST API and SuiteTalk web services. Your floor speaks PLC tags, OPC UA, and MQTT. The job is building the bridge between those two worlds and making it reliable enough that you trust the numbers without checking them by hand. That bridge is exactly what an MES layer is for.
HillPoint builds it with Ignition sitting on the OT side, reading your PLCs directly and talking to NetSuite over its API. Production transactions post as they happen. Finish a work order on the floor and the same work order closes in NetSuite. Material you consume decrements inventory, and scrap posts against the job. You stop paying someone to retype what the machines already recorded.
If you run NetSuite and you've been told the only way to connect it to the floor is an expensive middleware seat or a developer on retainer, that's worth a second opinion. This is uncontested ground. Very few controls engineers do NetSuite work, and very few NetSuite shops know a controls engineer they can call.
Production counts, downtime, OEE, and quality data, landing in your ERP
Once the pipe between the floor and the ERP exists, the question is what you push through it. Start with the numbers that change decisions.
When production counts land in the ERP automatically, your inventory and your cost of goods stop drifting from reality. When downtime and OEE come off live data, you're arguing from the same numbers as the floor instead of from memory. Shop floor to ERP is more than a dashboard. You end up with a business system that tells the truth about what the plant did, in near real time.
- Production counts. Real good-part and reject counts per line, per shift, per work order, posted to the ERP as they happen instead of keyed in at shift change.
- Downtime. Every stop, how long, and why, tagged to a reason code. The short stops and slow cycles that never make the logbook are usually where the hours actually go.
- OEE. Availability, performance, and quality calculated from live machine data, not from a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays. You find the real bottleneck, which is often not the line everyone blames.
- Quality data. Reject reasons, out-of-spec readings, and hold status captured at the machine and tied to the specific job and lot it came from.
Genealogy and traceability that survives an audit
For a lot of Florida manufacturers, the reason to connect the floor to the ERP has less to do with reporting and more to do with the audit. If you build for aerospace, food, or anything regulated, you have to prove genealogy: this finished unit came from these lots of raw material, ran on these machines at these process values, on this date, by this operator.
Build that record by hand and it's fragile. A traveler gets a coffee ring on it, a lot number gets transposed, and you find the gap the week the auditor is on site. When the MES layer captures genealogy at the machine and stores it against the work order, the record builds itself as you produce. OEE traceability and lot traceability come off the same data stream, so you're not maintaining two systems that disagree.
This holds whether you're carrying AS9100 for aerospace, SQF for food safety, or answering to FDEP on an environmental permit. The auditor asks for the history of a specific lot and you pull it in a minute instead of sending someone to dig through a filing cabinet and a shared drive. Same story for a recall or a customer complaint. You trace forward and backward from a lot number instead of guessing at the scope.
Kill the spreadsheet shadow factory
Every plant without real MES runs a second factory made of spreadsheets. There's the OEE workbook one supervisor maintains. The downtime log in a different format on a different shared drive. The production tracker somebody rebuilt after the last one got corrupted. The quality sheet nobody but one person understands. This is the shadow factory, and it runs on people retyping numbers the machines already have.
It's expensive in ways that don't show up on an invoice. People spend hours a week keeping it fed. The numbers in it disagree with each other and with the ERP, so meetings turn into arguments about whose spreadsheet is right. And it all lives in one or two people's heads, so when they leave, the reporting leaves with them.
MES integration kills the shadow factory by making the real data flow once, from the machine to the systems that need it. One source. The supervisors get their time back, and the numbers stop being a matter of opinion. That's usually the change people feel first.
How HillPoint builds it
HillPoint is one engineer, Will Cordero, with 18 years in industrial controls on programs at NASA, OneWeb Satellites, and Airbus US Space and Defence. MES implementation here means someone who has actually stood in front of the PLC, not a project manager coordinating an offshore team you never meet.
The work is vendor-agnostic on the plant side. Allen-Bradley and Rockwell (ControlLogix, CompactLogix, and the legacy SLC 500 and PLC-5 lines) or Siemens (S7-1200 and S7-1500 on TIA Portal). The MES and SCADA layer is Ignition 8.3, using Perspective for the screens and MQTT Sparkplug B into a Unified Namespace so every system reads the same live tags. On top of that sits the ERP connection, NetSuite or another system through its API.
It goes in phased, on top of what you already run, not as a rip and replace. A normal start is one line and one data type, counts or downtime, so you see real numbers landing in the ERP before you commit the whole plant. Then it grows. You don't shut down production to install it, and you don't bet the operation on a big-bang cutover.
HillPoint is based in Melbourne on the Space Coast and serves Central Florida. When you call (321) 378-0424, the engineer who does the work answers the phone.
Where does your plant floor data die before it reaches NetSuite?
Tell HillPoint what you run on the floor and what ERP you're keying numbers into by hand. Fifteen minutes with the engineer who'd do the work. No pitch, no deck. You'll hear what's worth connecting first and what it would take. Call (321) 378-0424 or book a time.