Facing year 2000 with SP95 integration standard

Dennis Brandl -- Control Engineering, 1/1/1999

To survive and prosper in the new millennium, manufacturers must optimize supply chains by integrating manufacturing control systems with business logistics systems. This is not an easy task because these two sectors evolved separately in most companies; they often don't understand the complete picture or each other's problems; and each uses numerous different planning, scheduling, inventory, maintenance, procurement, quality, production dispatching, process management, performance analysis, and labor management processes.

To solve these difficulties, manufacturers need a common terminology, a common definition of functionality, and a partitioning of functionality between logistics systems and manufacturing control systems. Several manufacturing firms, such as Eli Lilly, DuPont, and Arco, and controls and ERP vendors are working with ISA, the international society for measurement and control (Research Triangle Park, N.C.), and its SP95 Committee to develop the S95 Enterprise/Control System Integration Standard.

To develop a common language between management and production, the committee's d(draft)S95.01 standard will seek to correct confusing situations in which the same name is assigned to different objects, such as 'control recipe,' or different names are given to the same objects, such as 'line operation' and 'production phase.'

For example, dS95.01 defines 'production segment' as a segment of production associated with 'process stages' in batch manufacturing systems, 'assembly steps' in discrete manufacturing, and 'operations' in scheduling systems.

Because integration projects also become confused when assigning responsibilities that cross the boundary between logistics and manufacturing control, dS95.01 will also standardize functions normally found at that boundary. This means companies will be able to better assign responsibilities to organizations or groups, which can see how the assigned functionality fits into the overall picture.

Picking up where ISA's S88.01 Batch Control System standard left off at the process cell level, dS95.01 will define site and area functions, then provide discrete, continuous, and batch production strategies across the entire enterprise. dS95.01 will also model physical manufacturing assets, procedural manufacturing control activities, and manufacturing control data, and then focus horizontally across all manufacturing methods and all logistics strategies.

dS95.01 was released for ISA members' comments and review in November 1998. The committee expects to address all comments by 2Q99. In fact, several companies are already using dS95.01's models to design conforming tools. For instance, Sequencia Corp.'s (Phoenix, Ariz.) EnterpriseBatch connects batch manufacturing systems to business logistics systems in accordance with dS95.01's models.

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