He’s a principal business consultant, based in Sugar Hill, Ga., for Rockwell Automation, and is chair of ISA’s SP95 Committee.
“To me, S95 is fundamentally a requirement specification for what people have traditionally labeled ‘MES,’ “ Unger says. The standard specifies interfaces to the business and logistics levels. It also specifies interfaces to control levels, typically programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and distributed control systems (DCSs). These specifications are needed in the level between automation and business systems, Unger relates.
“Functionality is related to the definition, resource management, scheduling, dispatching and execution management, data collection, analysis and tracking of activities related to production, quality, maintenance and inventory,” explains Unger. Other topics covered in less detail include security; document, information and configuration management; and management of incidences and deviations.
Parts 1 and 2 of S95 address information exchange among business and manufacturing systems, and formally define the meaning of information, says industry consultant Dennis Brandl, at BR&L Consulting, Cary, N.C., who is the ISA SP95 committee’s editor. Those two parts have also been approved as International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard 62264-1 and 62264-2, respectively, says Brandl, who is also convener of Joint Working Group (JWG) 15, Enterprise Control System Integration, sponsored by IEC and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Its goal is to convert S95 to an international standard.
Coming are four more parts of S95. Part 3 will be models for manufacturing operations. It should be officially available early next year, Brandl believes. It addresses the boundary issue and defines what functions need to be under the control of manufacturing or business logistics systems, he explains. “I think this a really big issue. This is the first problem that needs to be addressed when trying to implement a manufacturing operations system.”
Parts 4, 5 and 6 will be, respectively, object models of manufacturing operations; business-to-manufacturing operations; and, likely, manufacturing-to-manufacturing operations.
Brandl notes that the original definition of MES was not broad enough to cover the full range of manufacturing activities. But Part 3 is sufficiently broad. “End-users are using it now to build their requirement specifications for manufacturing operations.”
See the story that goes with this sidebar: Plant-to-Business is THE Important Linkage
