As never before, marketplace competition compels enterprise operators, managers and executives to communicate clearly and fully. At stake is the business’ health and longevity. Real-time remains a catchphrase; seamless, a prayer; vertical integration, a target.

And at the core of the enterprise is the fundamental issue of data flow. This is certainly one of the most critical issues—and a measure of the organization’s well-being. The data pathway may be called shop floor-to-top floor, factory floor-to-board room or -executive suite, even sensor-to-customer connectivity.

Whatever its name, the route involves linked, logical steps. Controllers—whether for process or discrete manufacturing—aggregate data gathered from sensors and operators and send the data to servers for easy retrieval. Applications draw on these databases and translate them into meaningful business information. People who need information can then access just what is needed to perform their critical tasks.

Standing between manufacturing and the executive suite is the Information Technology team. This group holds the view that they are the virtual glue that binds the enterprise together.

Mostly, they’re right. They’re certainly closer to the boardroom, which means they’re closer to the money. They handle everything, from process and production data to financial and material resources.

It is essential that manufacturing and IT collaborate to ensure that the right information gets to the right destinations in the appropriate way. Production information can be correlated with costs and quality. Even downtime can be better forecast through predictive-maintenance tools.

Decision support

As manufacturing engineers and business managers have known for a very long time, historical data identify trends. Those trends supplement “it’s-happening-now” production information. Both support decision-making.

One supplier of process-related systems uses enterprise tools, including middleware and industry standards, to make it possible for its clients to gather data and achieve these vertical-integration goals. A discrete manufacturer installed a comprehensive networking technologies system to do the same.

“Converting technical characteristics of a manufacturing-floor operation to financial characteristics defines factory floor-to-boardroom connectivity,” says Bruce A. Jensen, manager of Yokogawa’s Systems Marketing and Sales Support.

It can start with a seasoned technology that finds factory-floor application in petroleum refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other process industries. An example is the company’s Centum CS 3000 R3 distributed control system (DCS) that runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP.

For connection to the enterprise, its information is fed to a process-information-management system or PIMS, he says. “That can be considered a manufacturing execution system or MES.”

His company provides two means to interface factory floor with enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), such as those provided by SAP, he says. “Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, such as our Stardom, also interface with a PIMS, such as our Exaquantum.”

SAP has PP-PI, its interface module to process systems, explains Jensen, who has 20 years’ experience in operations systems. Part of the linkage, PP-PI is used to gather process data as well as transactional data.

For the higher-level management team, basic measurement data—temperatures, flows, pressures, compositions—must be converted into key performance indicators such as unit utilization, yield or efficiency, percent utilization and inventory costs.

But, says Jensen, users must always ask: Why measure anything? “The only reason is to control, and the only reason you control is to make the process better. It’s the same in the business world. To control performance, you measure performance.” The idea is to optimize utilization, he explains, and therefore optimize performance.

“The most common method we use to exchange this information is object linking and embedding for process control, or OPC. It’s now a de facto industry standard.” Another evolving methodology, he says, is the extensible markup language, or XML, designed for Web-based data exchange. “We’ve used XML for recipe-data exchange, in specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve done this because of our involvement in ISA’s (Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society) S88 (batch) and S95 (enterprise) standards. The standards have created the tables for data exchange and basic protocols, called schemas. They’ve taken XML and created standards such as business-to-manufacturing mark-up language. The World Batch Forum’s Batch ML and B2MML are schemas that help with data.”

Important standards

Jensen believes ISA’s S88, S95 and S99 (data security) standards are of predominant importance to the process industries. “I almost consider S88 and S95 to be functional specifications and design documents to assist suppliers in creating products for users.”

For those process industries, Yokogawa has advanced operations tools—middleware connectivity products—that help analyze and automate simple operator tasks to assist managers and, ultimately, executives.

“On the batch side, we have Exabif to assist in ...