There are a number of ways to map out the world of performance management. One of the more scenic ways is by following the many highways and byways of interoperability. Performance management consists of the means and methods of monitoring enterprise activity to track progress toward specific goals. Taking the broadest possible view of a manufacturing business, these goals usually include:

o designing and making products that people want

o making sufficient numbers of those products to satisfy the need in a timely way

o 

On the surface, performance management and interoperability seem to have few links. Interoperability describes activity among devices, machines and computers (and their respective control or operating systems), as a capacity for communication and transference. When two devices are interoperable, commands can go back and forth between each, and can be carried out by both. ISO/IEC 2382-01, a standard of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, refines this definition as “the capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units.”

Interoperability can apply to entire computing environments, as when a manufacturing information technology (IT) interoperates with enterprise IT. Here, consistent, and generally, standardized data flows along standard communication paths. Importantly, the concept can be extended to people and organizations—where it becomes business process interoperability. To make it work in this context, you must make some basic assumptions, including the assumption that people want to share information and data, and they want to pull together for a common cause.

Safe to say, you can assume these in an effective organization. Still, those who have traveled the road to effectiveness can tell you that it may be dangerous to assume either without some stock-taking and considerable training. Turf wars, apparently a natural part of any group, can make sharing difficult. Many other forces—including prods meant to enhance performance—can lead an organization to many levels of internal competitiveness that cripples cooperation.

Of course, these issues can be solved—all it takes is a lot of work. But there are follow-on challenges, one of which is the fact that business systems and manufacturing systems in effect speak different languages. Defining boundaries between enterprise and manufacturing systems is important in this context, and is a primary focus in the development of standards such as the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society’s ISA-95, when those standards address data traveling from manufacturing to the enterprise level and vice-versa.

But, again, these issues can be solved. Whether technical or human, the primary focus of interoperability is on getting things done—that is, it is desirable because one group or control wants a second group or device to perform tasks. When interoperability exists, hooks for performance management just come along for the ride, just as on a highway from Chicago to New York, there are plenty of cellular phone towers along the way that will allow you to communicate to just about anyone concerning anything. Because interoperability provides a technical infrastructure for information flow and monitoring, there is every reason in the world to take advantage of these available information conduits to skim information useful for performance management.

Interoperability was not part of the picture 30 years ago. In those days, if you wanted people whaling away at keyboards in the same way everywhere, you bought one brand of computer and put compatible terminals everywhere. And it was not the dream of controls manufacturers in that day either—if you needed a consistent system for multiple machines, you either built your own or bought machines from the same maker.

Todd Stauffer, marketing manager for process automation systems, at Alpharetta, Ga.-based vendor Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., points out, “There are three eras of interoperability. The first was distributed, proprietary control systems—everyone did things differently. The second phase came about because customers wanted to choose best-in-class approaches, which meant tying systems from different vendors together. It was a great idea at the time, but a lot of effort went into making things work together, especially over equipment life cycles. You got the joy of rewriting things whenever a system revision was released. The third phase is openness or interoperability, and to a large extent, we’re there today.”

Much of the impetus toward interoperability in manufacturing began in earnest in the 1980s, culminating ...