The firm’s engineers note that manufacturers of food products generate a great deal of information for business systems. Omnicon wanted to improve the communication among different information systems so the dairy could guarantee fulfillment of quality standards established by legislation, while also increasing productivity levels and process performance.

To accomplish this, the dairy wanted to send plant information to those on the business side. “It is important for the business level to know the results of production, details of quantities and types of product,” says Fabian Yesid Lopez, an industrial automation engineer with Omnicon. “To share this data, we offered them a practical vision of how to work with models established by the ISA95 standard.” As well as using ISA95, the engineers also found it necessary to conduct a modeling phase, followed by an implementation phase using middleware to exchange Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) documents.

They used a number of models that are part of ISA95, including the functional flow model, the object model, the materials model, the process segment model and the production schedule model. ISA95 was developed by a committee of the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) and adopted as a standard by the American National Standards Institute as ANSI/ISA95.

Strong history

Omnicon chose ISA95 because of its history for making integration easier. “The ISA95 standard has a history of solving difficulties from information exchange between the business level and manufacturing,” says Lopez. “It has also enjoyed worldwide approval.”

As a result of using ISA95 and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based B2MML, Omnicon was able to connect the plant information to the enterprise quickly and effectively, saving the dairy money while improving manufacturing processes as well as business functions related to compliance and materials management.

Both ISA95 and B2MML have improved communication between the plant and the business office by offering models for sharing data. The benefit of the data sharing includes improved plant operations, materials flow, schedule management, even optimized inventory levels. ISA95’s role in that communication is to offer a consistent model for naming objects and processes that quickens the integration and reduces the hefty cost of customized programming.

ISA95 was first introduced in the mid-1990s. Much of the work on the model was prompted by large manufacturers who wanted a language to help communicate between automation control systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. “Five years ago, Nestle, DuPont, Dow and Miller were all pushing control vendors and ERP vendor SAP to talk about interoperability and make it easier,” says Tim Sowell, vice president of solutions strategy, for software vendor Wonderware, an Invensys company in Lake Forest, Calif. “That started a big drive. They all said, ‘Okay, we’re going to endorse ISA95.’ ”

ISA95 came out of the beating heart of the batch management standard ISA88. “I’ve seen ISA95 grow from nothing. It grew out of the governing body of ISA,” says Paul Lemert, senior partner, Simatic IT, at Siemens Energy and Automation Inc., the Alpharetta, Ga.-based automation vendor. “ISA had completed work on ISA88, and a lot of process manufacturers were using ISA88. They wanted to use something similar as a kind of communication between the plant and MES.”

The core value of ISA95 is the ability to agree on what data elements are called. “The naming structure was one of the biggest challenges for ISA95. It got everybody on the same page with structure, size and what is meant by time,” says Wonderware’s Sowell. “People have their own ideas with naming, but ISA95 is a good starting point.”

Model thinking

The power of ISA95 is its interoperability between systems. This, however, is not a standard in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a model that can assist in determining what definitions two systems can use to exchange information. “ISA95 is not really a standard. It’s a model, and that distinction is important,” says Alison Smith, research director, AMR Research Inc., in Boston. “ISA95 is a model that lays out an understanding of a taxonomy and lets us think about the processes of manufacturing in a common terminology.”

Smith believes that ISA95 provides a strategy for exchanging information from disparate applications. But those applications are not restricted to automation control and ERP. “Where you draw the line between manufacturing and business is up to your business model. Vendors push that there is a boundary, but that’s because of the boundaries of their applications,” says Smith. “ISA95 doesn’t suggest any applications whatsoever, so it doesn’t matter where the boundary is.”

Yet even if ...