MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) run production, collect data in real time and alert managers. Yet they overlook an essential resource: the field know-how of technicians.
For several decades, MES and other SaaS software have established themselves as the pillars of industrial management. These are valuable tools, certainly, but ones that too often remain distant from the realities of the shop floor. And it is precisely on the shop floor that performance is decided: in the technicians' actions, in empirical diagnostics, in the reflexes built up over successive interventions.
Mimorian is an industrial intelligence platform that models equipment, structures failure diagnosis and captures the know-how of maintenance teams through a multi-agent AI architecture. Its approach: build a functional digital twin of each piece of equipment and support technicians in their reasoning, so that field knowledge is structured naturally, with no extra effort.
So how do we bridge this gap between digital systems and operational reality?
Enrichment through the figures
ERP adoption [Source: NetSuite/Panorama Consulting, 2025]
53% of industrial companies place ERP among their digital investment priorities.
Growth of the MES market The global MES market is expected to grow from 15 billion USD in 2024 to 39 billion in 2034, an annual growth rate of 10.2%, which testifies to the scale of their adoption
The cost of poor knowledge sharing
Large companies lose an average of 47 million dollars per year because of ineffective knowledge sharing.
These figures show how important these systems are, without addressing the challenges of capturing technical knowledge. Because beyond the figures:
- When an experienced technician leaves the company, a whole body of empirical knowledge often disappears with them.
- Breaks in the handover between teams are still common.
- The lack of knowledge capture directly limits quality, responsiveness and upskilling.
Why go beyond conventional tools?
ERP, MES, CMMS. Each plays its part in the digital factory. But between these building blocks, field technical knowledge remains the great forgotten asset. What technicians discover, adapt or resolve day to day is still passed on too often in an informal way, and ends up being lost like a form of industrial amnesia.
Yet this operational knowledge is valuable. It is what makes it possible to react quickly, to avoid repeated mistakes, to make progress from one failure to the next. Industrial intelligence platforms such as Mimorian set out precisely to bridge this gap. Rather than simply archiving, Mimorian models each piece of equipment in a relational graph (a functional digital twin), then orchestrates specialised AI agents to support the technician in their diagnostic reasoning. The report is generated automatically from the voice exchange, and each intervention enriches the factory's collective memory.
How do we structure what MES do not capture?
The solution lies in approaches that complement MES and ERP: tools able to structure field feedback, hands-on practices and empirical diagnostics directly on the shop floor.
This is the approach taken by industrial intelligence platforms such as Mimorian. The technician interacts by voice with an assistant that knows the machine, its components and its functional links. The AI proposes ranked hypotheses, guides them towards the relevant tests, and the technician confirms or rules out each lead. The report builds itself. The result: each technician becomes a driver of the collective memory, with no additional data-entry effort.
For an overview of the subject, read our complete guide: How to capture know-how in industrial maintenance? The complete guide.
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