One of the major advantages of the ANSI/ISA-95 standard (promulgated by the International Society of Automation and adopted by the American National Standards Institute) is its ability to provide automated, error-free data exchange. Chevron turned to ISA95 to transform the data collection in its U.S.-based lubricant plants from a manual, error-prone process to an error-free automated system.

Chevron Products Co. is a San Ramon, Calif.-based company that produces lubricants such as oils and greases. The company runs an operational control system (OCS) as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, running sales, marketing, inventory and warehousing. The plants also had product control systems that ran the manufacturing. “They were way overdue to be replaced,” says Mark Weinmann, project manager at Chevron. “So we undertook a program and selected Yokogawa as the vendor in 2008.”

Yokogawa introduced the team to ISA95 using business-to-manufacturing markup language (B2MML). Chevron runs a specialized platform of fault-tolerant servers with high uptime. “When we learned about ISA95, we wondered whether the servers had the tools we needed,” says Weinmann. “We found some tools there. We used XML Thunder (for eXtensible Markup Language) that converts the XML-based B2MML to the system so we can read it.”

After the B2MML was set up, the team found it was easy to build and send messages back and forth between the systems. At that point, the connection became a data-mapping exercise. “After we began the exercise and began testing, we found we were missing this data element or that data element, but adding was easy,” says Weinmann. “We didn’t have to rewrite it because the B2MML language made it easy and flexible.”

The plants implemented the new system in May of this year, and the interface to the ERP system was part of the implementation. “It works like a champ—the messages go back and forth,” says Weinmann. He also notes that the team has used the ISA95 standard to help the ERP interface with another system. “Now we have a standard interface and find we can use the same concept. So we can leverage our learning and apply ISA95 to other projects.”

The net result of the interface is considerably fewer errors. “The information from our old custom interface was error-prone and required a lot of manual work. When we put in the new [ISA95] interface, there were virtually no errors,” says Weinmann. “It was vastly different, 50 percent to 60 percent better than the old interface.”

ISA95 has come into its own during recent years. While large manufacturers led the early adoption, it has crossed a wide swath of industries, from refineries and pulp-and-paper to pharmaceuticals and food-and-beverage. Many of the large manufacturers are pushing adoption down their supply chain to Tier One and Tier Two suppliers. While ISA95 was originally developed by process manufacturers, it has gained the attention of discrete manufacturers as well. The growing adoption of ISA95 was also spurred on by ERP vendor SAP AG’s adoption of the standard.

ISA95 is a standard for developing an automated interface between enterprise and control systems. ISA95 was conceived by those involved in the development of ISA88, a standard for addressing batch process control. “The ISA95 work was led by the ISA88 team,” says Bob Lenich, Syncade platform director at Emerson Process Management, an Austin, Texas-based automation supplier. He is also a member of the ISA95 committee. “The new group pulled together to address the gap between the enterprise and control systems.”

Widely adopted

While ISA95 has been in development for 14 years, it’s only been in recent years that it has gained widespread acceptance. “A team started to work on the standard in 1995, but I would estimate it was only about four years ago that we reached a critical mass of vendors to officialize it,” says Don Clark, vice president of global industry solutions for automation supplier Invensys Operations Management (IOM), in Plano, Texas. “Key participants kicked the ball over the line—one was an end-user, BP.”

He notes that SAP, the Waldorf, Germany-based ERP giant, was not initially supportive of the standard. “At first, SAP said the world didn’t need a standard for exchanging data between the plant and the ERP system,” says Clark. “We slogged ahead anyway, and about five years ago, they said, ‘You know, you’re right, it’s too difficult.’ ” SAP ended up implementing ISA95 in its system in 2004.

“The biggest benefit ISA95 has brought is a common language for specifications that allow people to better describe the data exchanges and the workflow ...