director of solutions strategy at Microsoft. “We’ve been very focused in working with ISA95 to match the business process in the ERP to the plant data that’s been mapped.”

But standards haven’t completely solved the problem of integrating multiple plants. Each plant typically has unique systems of varied ages. In most cases, each plant will involve some custom integration. “Even though there is a lot of standardization at the ERP and plant levels, what we’re seeing is that these interfaces are still custom interfaces built on a plant-by-plant basis,” says Paul Rauch, senior director at vendor Siemens IT Solutions and Services, in Norwalk, Conn.

If you build a group of new plants simultaneously, integration across the entire operation would be very straightforward. But in reality, each plant is a patchwork of old and new machines run by old and new control systems with old and new programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and networks. The complexity is multiplied when you’re working with numerous plants. Standards help convert plant data into ERP-ready information, but the process is still very complicated.

Sidebar - Integrating ERP and Manufacturing in Pharma
To read the accompanying sidebar, go to www.automationworld.com/feature-4624