How PPG Built MES Blueprints for 140 Plants

At GE Vernova Accelerate 2026, Clark Rexrode, Colin Reilly, Chris Grega, and Ben Hoff from PPG presented how the company deploys Proficy MES across a manufacturing network of 140 to 150 facilities in more than 50 countries. PPG, a coatings and specialty materials company with $15.9 billion in 2025 sales, developed product technology blueprints for four manufacturing types: liquid, powder, resin, and greenfield. After completing the first template projects, standardized integrations delivered about 80% configuration reuse from one site to the next. The rollout spans three business divisions (industrial coatings, aerospace, and OLED manufacturing) and involves both on-prem and SaaS deployments depending on the product technology and regulatory constraints.

Why 140 Plants Need Four Different Blueprints

PPG has grown through acquisition, resulting in a manufacturing network where liquid coatings, powder coatings, resin production, and specialty products like OLED materials each operate different equipment, processes, and quality requirements. After an initial Proficy deployment, the team recognized that treating every plant as an individual project would not scale to the full footprint.

Each blueprint answers four questions: what modules will be implemented (OEE, quality, production management, or all), how the systems will be configured (on-prem, SaaS, PPG Cloud, or hybrid), what strategic need the plant has (quality, labor, downtime, or throughput), and what integration playbook can be reused from previous sites.

Liquid and resin blueprints were completed in 2025. A greenfield blueprint covers new facilities where the team can design the full technology stack from the start, including batch control system integration.

What PPG Completed and Initiated in 2025

The industrial coatings business finished projects across multiple business units in 2025: specialty products in the US (two sites) and Ireland as a multi-site instance covering OEE, production management, quality, and full-module deployments; resin in Brazil; and liquid in China. Both liquid and resin template projects were completed with multiple vendor partners involved.

New efforts applied those templates for the first time in additional regions. Resin deployments started in the US, Brazil, and Spain. Powder started in Brazil and Poland. Liquid started in Spain, Brazil, the US, China (two sites), and Italy. Additional projects launched in Poland and France.

The team restructured during the year. Initially organized as a global functional and technical team, PPG shifted to regional functional and regional technical teams to support parallel deployments across geographies. A new MES Center of Excellence (COE) now brings stakeholders from IT and the business together on a monthly basis with a steering committee, defining which modules each plant type needs and what the enterprise approach should be.

In aerospace, PPG completed its first full MES implementation at a single site in France covering OEE, production management, quality, and Historian. EY and Grey Matter served as systems integrators. The site also served as the first deployment of the greenfield blueprint. Separately, the transparencies platform completed Historian and reporting instances at three US sites (California, Texas, Alabama), recently upgraded to the latest 2025 Proficy version. Seven application support centers across North America are now running an OEE implementation to track throughput, waste, and efficiency, with five more planned and a separate Asia Pacific instance coming in 2027. A greenfield facility in North Carolina is in the design phase for a full MES implementation with batch control integration across three manufacturing processes: coatings, sealants, and polymer reactions.

Where MES Prevented a Contamination Event in Real Time

PPG is the exclusive manufacturer of OLED materials for Universal Display Corporation, which supplies Samsung and LG. One gram of OLED material produces about 1,000 cell phones. The material requires extremely high purity. Cross-contamination can compromise an entire batch.

MES went live across three OLED sites in 2025: Monroeville, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh); Barberton, Ohio (near Akron); and Shannon, Ireland. Rovis served as the systems integrator. The project delivered barcoding implementation, label generation, reduced manual data entry, real-time global data access across all three sites, and managing by exception through real-time deviation alerts.

In October 2025, shortly after go-live, the system caught a contamination risk during a blending step. An operator picked up the wrong sieve. Only two products were handled in that area, leaving a single chance for error. The MES system flagged the barcode scan as incorrect and alerted the operator immediately. The mistake was corrected before any material was affected.

Without MES, the error would likely have been discovered during analytical testing, well after the batch was compromised. The barcode check avoided batch contamination and the potential loss of an entire batch of OLED material.

Eight Lessons from Multi-Site MES Deployment

Across industrial, aerospace, and OLED deployments, PPG identified eight lessons:

1. Train early and often. Do not wait until the last two to three weeks before go-live. Continue training after go-live because the system will require iteration.
2. Prepare application and infrastructure first. Have the environment ready so projects are not blocked waiting to start. Understand how to support that infrastructure as well.
3. Understand process versus discrete. PPG has used both models within Proficy. Each requires different operational alignment, and the choice depends on the business processes at the facility.
4. Know when to customize. Out-of-the-box functionality does not always match the process. Sometimes the process has to change. Sometimes customization is the right answer. Understand when each applies.
5. MES amplifies the weakest processes. The system will expose bottlenecks and gaps, especially during startup.
6. Start planning early. MES implementation requires resources on both the business and IT sides and cannot be rushed.
7. Clean data before deployment. At the aerospace site in France, 40% of the route data on the existing production traveler reflected the actual process on the floor. The remaining 60% was inaccurate and required a major data uplift before go-live that continues to this day.
8. Business involvement is non-negotiable. A business co-lead and participation from operations, process engineering, and plant operations are required. Without business ownership, the project will struggle.

Architecture is a site-by-site decision. Aerospace government contracts prevent full SaaS adoption, placing some sites in a hybrid or on-prem model. Industrial deployments use SaaS for OEE across multiple sites but keep on-prem configurations where production-critical processes require proximity. The decision depends on the module, the product technology, and whether existing control systems sit between the MES and the equipment.

This article is based on a presentation by Clark Rexrode (IT Director, Aerospace IT), Colin Reilly (Sr. IT Manager, Industrial Business IT), Chris Grega (IT Manager, Aerospace IT), and Ben Hoff (Digitization Team Leader, OLED Manufacturing) at PPG, delivered at GE Vernova Accelerate 2026. Lucian Fogoros of IIoT World attended the event. AI tools were used to help summarize and organize the content. Reviewed and edited by the IIoT World editorial team.

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