Longwood, FL— A group of manufacturers and software vendors recently endorsed the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society's (ISA) ISA-95 Enterprise Control System Integration standards and World Batch Forum's (WBF) Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) for implementing ISA's standards.

The group made its endorsement at a plant-to-business interoperability workshop hosted by SAP, an enterprise management software supplier, and ARC Advisory Group. Attendees also discussed establishing an open vendor and user consortium to share knowledge and best practices for plant-floor-to-business integration, and provide compliance certification for using B2MML and related standards.

B2MML's schemas, which were developed by WBF, are an XML implementation of the ISA-95 standard. The standard establishes a common definition and format for information exchange between plant-floor and business systems.