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Paving the Road to ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION
Last year, the Colombia-based engineering firm, Omnicon Ltd. wanted to help a dairy customer integrate its automation production system with its enterprise business system.
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...
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The 5 Pieces of ISA95
ISA95 is short for ANSI/ISA95. It consists of models and terminology required for sharing plant data with manufacturing execution systems (MES) and business systems. While it's not technically a standard, it does offer definitions that can be used as a model for plant engineers to communicate effectively with other areas of the corporation and with partners.
ISA95 was introduced in 1995 to resolve integration issues and lower the cost of tying the plant to the enterprise. According to the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society, ISA95 provides common terminology, information exchange, workflows, best practices, models, activities and functions...
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How to Get Management Approval
This is a sidebar to the feature article "Stepping up to Green — It's Good Business", that appears in the March, 2008 issue of Automation World.
Cassie Quaintenance is energy segment manager at Schneider Electric, in Nashville, Tenn. and is a certified energy manager. She works both internally with the Schneider manufacturing plants and facilities, and with customers of the automation company on issues relating to energy. Here are some tips that she has learned through experience for successful justification and implementation of energy projects...
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