the batch upstream to those doing the process development,” says Alison Smith, director of research at AMR Research Inc., in Boston. “It allows the people who are doing the first design to have a common language with the equipment they’re probably going to use. That gives you a tighter coupling from design to production.”

ISA88 was first adopted by large manufacturers. While some mid- to small-size manufacturers have started to adopt it, a large percentage of smaller plants have not yet shifted to the standard. “As much as we would like it to be the norm, I still work with clients who ask what ISA88 is,” says Smith, “It’s not as widely used as ISA95, which came along later. There’s a lot of room for public relations around ISA88.”

Beyond batch

  In the past few years, manufacturers have been applying the benefit of ISA88 beyond the batch environment. Semiconductor plants have applied it to discrete manufacturing, and chemical companies have extended its use to continuous manufacturing. “Continuous manufacturers have started using ISA88 in the chemical industry,” says BR&L’s Brandl. “They were using it for batch management, so they started to apply those same tools to managing start-up and shut-down in the continuous operations.” Their use of ISA88 in batch provided a good set of procedures on how to do a switchover, so they simply applied their recipe modules to their continuous operations.

Surprisingly, the electronics industry is finding ISA88 to be a handy standard. With the need for quick changes in the manufacturing process, semiconductor plants find ISA88 very helpful. “They have to do rapid switchovers, so their manufacturing facilities have to be very flexible,” says Brandl. “ISA88 gives them a structure to determine how to set up the next product.”

As non-batch manufacturers see value in ISA88, it is evolving to meet a wider set of needs. “There is a big effort in the industry to re-write ISA88 and apply it outside batch operations to discrete, continuous and semi-continuous manufacturing,” says Murray, of Emerson Process Management. “Part of the reason is they want to have things in a defined modular structure.”

The future of ISA88 is wide open. Companies are beginning to use the standard in areas never expected, from maintenance to machine part analyzing and equipment allocation. “We’re seeing that ISA88 is not just for batch any longer,” says ARC’s Blanchard. “People are seeing advantages to ISA88 in both automatic and manual operations. Traditionally, it’s been in batch, but now it’s extending to any procedure.”

To see the accompanying sidebar to this story - "ISA88.5 and the State Model" - please visit http://www.automationworld.com/view-3897