An MES (Manufacturing Execution System) is the layer that was missing between the ERP (which plans, costs and invoices) and the real shop floor (where the parts are made). It captures produced quantities, operation times, stoppages, defects and raw-material consumption in real time, and feeds this information back to the ERP, to costing and to management dashboards.
The operational difference is large. Without an MES, the real cost of a work order is only known at month-end, after reconciling paperwork, estimated times and manual declarations. With an MES, cost propagates in seconds: the section supervisor sees OEE per line, the planner sees on-time performance, management sees margin per order.
KORA Productivity by INFOS is the MES verticalised for Portuguese industry; it runs on Android terminals on the shop floor, with a robust offline mode, integrates with PLCs via OPC-UA where instrumentation justifies it, and feeds the MULTI ERP in real time. In typical implementations, recovering 10-20 OEE points in the first six months does not come from people working harder — it comes from the bottlenecks becoming visible.