Why Solution Architects and Functional Analysts Are Key to MES Project Success

In many MES (Manufacturing Execution System) implementations, there’s a common assumption: all you need is a solid functional and design specification, and a capable development team to build against it. In fact, we often see RFPs that state outright that the specifications are already complete, and all that's needed is an implementation team.

On paper, that might sound efficient. In practice, it's a risky oversimplification that can lead to misalignment, rework, and ultimately, project delays and underwhelming outcomes.

We have found that two roles—Functional Analyst and Solution Architect—are pivotal in accelerating execution, reducing risk, and ensuring that the MES solution delivers meaningful value from both business and technical perspectives.

 

The Functional Analyst: Breaking Down Barriers Between Business and Technical Teams

The Functional Analyst plays a crucial role as the bridge between the customer and the technical implementation team. This role goes well beyond gathering requirements—these resources:

  • Break down complex business processes into actionable, technically implementable pieces
  • Collaborate continuously with the customer, validating that what’s being designed and built maps back to real operational value
  • Act as the customer’s functional advocate, ensuring that the final system supports their workflows, compliance needs, and efficiency goals—not just in theory, but in practice

Without this role, development teams often work in a vacuum, relying on interpretations of static specs rather than an evolving understanding of customer goals. This can result in systems that technically meet the spec, but miss the mark on usability, flexibility, or business alignment.

 

The Solution Architect: Guarding Against Technical Missteps

Just as the Functional Analyst advocates for the business, the Solution Architect advocates for the customer’s technical landscape.

This person's role is to ensure that the solution is:

  • Architecturally sound and aligns with your enterprise IT strategies
  • Secure by design, following the customer’s authentication, authorization, and data protection policies
  • Performant and scalable, avoiding bottlenecks or patterns that may work now but degrade under real-world load
  • Built with vendor platform best practices in mind, minimizing future technical debt

Consider what happens without a Solution Architect’s oversight:

  • A report is built using a brute-force data query that works in dev but fails under production load
  • A custom interface stores sensitive data in an insecure format, exposing compliance risk
  • A seemingly small customization bypasses platform best practices, introducing hidden bugs and future upgrade blockers

These issues are costly—not just in time and rework, but in stakeholder trust.

The Misconception: Overhead vs. Insurance

Some organizations may view these roles as adding overhead, thereby increasing the cost of implementation. In fact, they may even explicitly seek out vendors who don’t include higher-level roles such as Functional Analysts or Solution Architects, believing that teams focused solely on execution are more cost-effective. On the surface, that can make those proposals look more attractive.

But in reality, these roles act as insurance against misalignment, technical inefficiencies, and business value gaps—all of which tend to surface much later in the project, when they’re far more expensive to fix.

We believe that every team member—developer, lead, project manager—should keep the solution’s business value and technical soundness in mind. But the Functional Analyst and Solution Architect are dedicated to ensuring exactly that. Their presence makes those goals explicit, accountable, and consistent throughout the lifecycle of the project.

We include these roles in our estimates and work breakdown structures, and we’ve developed documented best practices for how they engage across the implementation lifecycle. These practices are formalized as part of our DxOps Transformation service offerings, ensuring that their contributions are not ad hoc, but structured, repeatable, and deeply embedded in our delivery model.

By embedding these roles in our MES projects, we dramatically improve the odds that the final solution will meet the needs of both the operational and technical teams. They reduce rework, shorten decision cycles, and help us deliver a system that performs well, scales appropriately, and is embraced by users.

 

Conclusion: Building the Right Thing the Right Way

MES implementations are complex. They touch critical business processes, must integrate cleanly with enterprise systems, and operate in demanding manufacturing environments. That’s why we believe that delivering to spec isn’t enough—we need to deliver to purpose.

Functional Analysts and Solution Architects help us do just that. They turn specifications into real-world solutions. And their involvement is not overhead—it’s one of the smartest investments you can make toward project success.