Over the last two decades, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) have been an essential industrial software for production execution and shop-floor automation. However, the advent of Industry 4.0 has created a demand for a next-generation MES that can process large amounts of time series sensor data generated by Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and merge it with production execution data. Integrating IIoT technologies with legacy MES software has proven challenging due to the monolithic design, inflexible data model, and poor horizontal scalability of relational databases used to store MES data.
This paper explores the challenges associated with traditional relational databases used in MES software and how MongoDB addresses these challenges, allowing IIoT devices and MES to work collaboratively and synchronously, meeting Industry 4.0's scalability, flexibility, and interoperability requirements.