This Special Issue of the Manufacturing Engineering Society 2019 (SIMES-2019) has been launched as a joint issue of the journals Applied Sciences and Materials. The 10 contributions published in this Special Issue of Applied Sciences present cutting-edge advances in the field of manufacturing engineering, focusing on production planning, sustainability, metrology, cultural heritage, and materials processing, with experimental and numerical results. It is worth mentioning that the topic “production planning” has attracted a great number of contributions in this journal, due to their applicative approach.

Decisive potential in business is a question of process capability, rather than production capability. Process capability in business requires real-time systems for optimization. Business-IT needs to be developed from telecommunications and ERP to real-time services, which are not offered by the prevailing ERP systems. This book shows how modern information technology Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) becomes the prerequisite for process capability of the company on the basis of many practical examples. It describes the requirements for optimized MES. It gives an overview of the efficiency potentials and different applications of MES.