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60 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 speech recognition and bots, the standard so- ware user interfaces (UIs) as we know them may cease to exist. Make It Real With Augmented MES So, we've laid out an ideal of a factory that uses IoT and AR to boost productivity and accelerate improvement. e great news: ere are commercial MES products today that support these technologies. ese mod- ern soware suites are designed from the ground up to support Industry 4.0 and the con- nected technologies involved. In this way, they are augmented MES. Augmented MES can make this ideal real. MES contains a lot of information readily available to show as soon as the assets are iden- tified in the model. Augmented MES can help you explore, build, and improve the manufac- turing digital twin and use AR. MES is proven to deliver value almost immediately. However, not every MES is ready to do that. Older versions almost certainly are not. Even many current systems do not have the breadth of applications nor the augmented capabili- ties to support Industry 4.0, IIoT, digital twin, and AR. ose that do can become an important element in the digital thread. Putting opera- tional data into context and making it avail- able across enterprise and automation sys- tems is what MES does best. With more and more distributed data coming in, this MES role is growing. Beyond taking a few steps forward, com- panies that adopt an augmented MES will find they can move confidently. Augmented MES accelerates a company's progress toward Industry 4.0 dramatically and immediately. ere's no time like now to start. SMT007 Óscar Martins is an area manager for Electronics/SMT at Critical Manufacturing. This article is based on a white paper titled "Digital Twin and Augmented Reality: From Ideal to Real with MES," published in 2020. Figure 7: There are applications for AR in every discipline in the plant. Examples of disciplines and uses. Your applications are limited only by the imagination of users once you have the right foundation.