Brandl - Business To Manufacturing Collaboration
Brandl - Business To Manufacturing Collaboration
Brandl - Business To Manufacturing Collaboration
Dennis Brandl
[email protected]
Sequencia Corporation
ABSTRACT
Integrating business and manufacturing is a key process for manufacturing companies. Integration
requires that that business process and manufacturing process exchange commonly understood
information, yet this must be accomplished without unnecessary impact to the existing business
processes or manufacturing processes. The ANSI/ISA-95 Enterprise/Control System Integration
standards define an effective model to meet these goals. This paper reviews the ISA-95 standard,
the benefits of using the standard for integration, and XML schemas based on the standard.
Summary
This paper defines the economic reasons for business to manufacturing integration, some of the key
business drivers that require integration, a definition of a standard for integration, who will benefit from
the standard, and a brief overview of the standard for business to manufacturing integration.
Keywords: ERP, PLM, SCM, MES, Integration, Manufacturing, XML, Standards, ANSI/ISA-95
1 INTRODUCTION
Integrating business and manufacturing is a key process for manufacturing companies. Manufacturing
departments must quickly and efficiently build the right products, at the right time, for the right markets.
This requires correct and timely information to manufacturing from the rest of the business, and it
requires timely and accurate updates on actual production from manufacturing to the rest of the
business. Integration requires that that business process and manufacturing process exchange
commonly understood information, yet this must often be accomplished without unnecessarily impact
to the existing business processes or manufacturing processes. In addition, the integration must
handle the diversity of manufacturing and business systems in a typical company. This paper defines
a model for MES, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and
SCM (Supply Chain Management) integration that can be applied to a wide range of discrete, batch,
and continuous manufacturing industries.
An “Available To Promise” (ATP) process is achieved by providing order takers (sales and
distribution channels) access to inventory and production capability information, so that they are
able to commit to reliable delivery dates in real time. Implementing ATP may be a key business
driver because companies that consistently fail to meet their promised delivery dates, will lose
business to more reliable suppliers. Some companies that have focused on their ATP processes
have reduced late and incomplete shipments from over 70% to under 3%, thereby dramatically
increasing customer satisfaction and improving the companies’ profitability.
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Implementing ATP processes requires near real time visibility into production capability.
Manufacturing information needed for automated ATP processes include:
• Current finished goods inventory.
• Current production plan for that product.
• Realistic capacities of the production facility of that product.
• Raw material inventories.
One key measure of a company’s efficiency is manufacturing cycle times and inventory turns.
This is a direct measure of the efficiency of manufacturing assets. To reduce cycle time a
business must first identify areas where most of the delay and waiting occurs and then address
them appropriately. Information from manufacturing must define actual data on the production
capabilities and throughput of plants, areas, production lines, process cells, and production units.
This allows effective allocation of assets to products, integration with planned maintenance, and
better inter-site and intra-site planning.
The key business driver of reducing raw material and final product inventory is implemented
through supply chain optimization. Supply chain optimization covers four main areas: Source,
Make, Deliver, and Plan, as defined by the Supply Chain Council - www.supply-chain.org. No
effective and optimal schedule can be built without knowledge of current and planned available
capacity and detailed knowledge of actual production throughput for different products. Supply
chain optimization also requires that the manufacturing departments run on near real time
schedules, often receiving schedule updates several times a day. Implementing supply chain
optimization requires the following exchanged information between the business functions and
manufacturing:
• Currently committed resource capabilities
• Currently available resource capabilities
• Future committed resource capabilities
• Future available resource capabilities
• Actual resources required per product and per production segment
Activity Based Costing (ABC) is a process that attempts to assign cost to specific segments of
production (such as assembly, inspection, and packaging) by product, in order to determine the
true cost of production per product. Activity based costing allows companies to determine what
products are profitable or unprofitable so that they can make decisions on pricing, outsourcing,
and investments. Exchanged information required for activity based costing includes:
• Actual material resources used per segment of production per product
• Actual timing of personnel, equipment, and energy uses per segment of production per
product
In work inventory can be a serious drain on a company’s capital investment, yet it is often a
problem hidden from normal financial review. Reducing in-work inventory requires knowledge of
the actual state of product production and levels of intermediate materials. These need to be
reported on a regular basis so costs can be determined, bottlenecks identified, throughput
improved, and in-work inventory reduced. The book The Goal by E.M. Goldratt provides a good
reference on the benefits and methods for reducing inventory.
Integration of business and manufacturing systems can have an impact on an entire economy, even
when implemented by a small percentage of companies. Experts on the USA economy have tied
much of the recent rise in productivity to Information Technology (IT) and reductions of inventory. For
example, the USA Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on June 14, 1999, “… But the
recent years’ remarkable surge in the availability of real-time information has enabled business
management to remove large swaths of inventory safety stocks and worker redundancies and has
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armed firms with detailed data to fine-tune product specifications to most individual customer needs.”
These impacts have been felt despite the estimate that only 20% of companies with more than $500M
USD in annual revenue have installed SCM (AMR Research).
• The method separates business processes from manufacturing processes to reduce the
complexity of integration.
The ANSI/ISA-95 Enterprise/Control System Integration standards define an effective model to meet
these goals. The ANSI/ISA-95 standard was developed because of a concern by IT professionals and
manufacturing professionals about the problems and difficulties in business to manufacturing
integration. As more manufacturing systems are being automated, MES systems installed, and ERP
systems coming on-line, there is increasing pressure to integrate these systems.
The group of IT and manufacturing professionals that made up the ISA SP95 committee developing
the standard believed that a standard would help resolve the ambiguities and enable the development
of robust and safe interfaces. A standard would not only address the important problems raised by
manufacturing about maintaining the safety and regulatory compliance of systems, but also address
the important problems of information accuracy and timeliness raised by IT professionals. The
standard was developed with the goal of internationalization, so that the problems of large multi-
national companies and large multi-nation vendors would be addressed.
Several problems have to be addressed for effective integration. One consistent problem is a clear
understanding of the boundary of responsibilities between the systems. The manufacturing engineers
were concerned about the loss of quality, safety, responsiveness, and reliability if forced to use ERP
systems to run their factory equipment. IT professionals were concerned about the quality, reliability,
and accuracy of information obtained from the factory floor. Worse yet, vendors were sometimes
making exaggerated claims of functionality which confused users and management.
1) A common terminology and a consistent set of concepts and models for integrating control
systems with enterprise systems (ANSI/ISA-95.00.01 Enterprise/Control System Integration –
Part 1: Models and Terminology).
The technology effect of the ANSI/ISA-95 Enterprise/Control System Integration standard will be a
reduction in the time and effort to integrate of business ERP, SCM (Supply Chain Management), and
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PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) with MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems). Currently each
integration effort is a “one-of-a-kind” effort because of the large number of possible combinations.
For example, the ERP system may be provided by SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Baan, or SCT. The
manufacturing system may be provided by Siemens, Rockwell, Honeywell, Invensys, Emerson, or
ABB. The PLM solution may be provided by Sequencia, PTC, or MatrixOne. Within a company there
may be a single ERP and a single PLM solution, but there are often a large number of different
manufacturing solutions. Some companies have multiple ERP systems and manufacturing systems
because of mergers and acquisitions, compounding the problem. XML schemas derived from the ISA
standard will reduce the technological complexity of integrating these systems together.
The second effect of the standard will be on internal departments within a company and their ability to
collaborate and communicate on integration projects. In many companies the manufacturing
departments and the IT departments have been operating in separate universes with only occasional
interactions. Manufacturing systems have traditionally be designed, installed, and operated by
engineers for their own departments, while IT systems have been designed, installed, and operated by
IT professionals for other departments (finance, accounting, human resources, etc…). Because of
their different backgrounds and focus, these two groups have a difficult time communicating.
Previously they did not share much common technology. However, today MES, PLM, SCM and ERP
systems are all based on the same commercially available PC based client and Windows or Unix
based servers. Modern business systems now also require the same 24x7 (24 hours a day, 7 days a
week) uptime and reliability requirement that manufacturing systems always had.
Companies are also now requiring automated, efficient, and accurate information exchanges between
their business systems (ERP, SCM and PLM) and their manufacturing systems (MES, DCS and PLC)
and they are finding they do not share the same names for items. They sometimes call the different
information sets by the same name, and there is little understanding of the meaning or need for
exchanged data. The ANSI/ISA-95 standard for business to manufacturing can help departments
within companies. It provides a dictionary of terms and a formal model of exchanged information, so
that all departments can use the same words and understand the meaning and content of data
exchanges.
Because of the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions, many factories are now owned by different
companies than before. The factories find that they have to provide information and accept
information using terminology that they do not understand. Likewise, IT departments are finding that
they must integrate with multiple different factories, each having their own different names for items
and different structures for the data. The ANSI/ISA-95 standard provides a model for companies to
use to communicate internally. This can be done without requiring any software support or systems
support because it is just a way to identify and document the elements of that that must be exchanged.
4 AN OVERVIEW OF ANSI/ISA-95
The following sections provide an overview of some of the important aspects covered by the standard.
There is a simple set of guidelines that define the scope of responsibility for manufacturing operations.
These rules help companies determine who has responsibility for specific functions: business
functions or manufacturing operations. The guidelines are:
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The function is in the scope of manufacturing operations if the function is critical to maintaining
regulatory compliance in production operations. This includes such factors as safety,
environmental, and CGMP (Current Good Manufacturing Practices) compliance.
The function is in the scope of manufacturing operations if the function is critical to maintaining
plant reliability.
The function is in the scope of manufacturing operations if the function is critical to maintaining
product quality.
The function is in the scope of manufacturing operations if the function impacts the operation
phase of the facility’s life, as opposed to design and construction phases of a facility’s life.
These guidelines help define the boundary between the Level 3 and Level 4 functions illustrated in
Figure 1.
Manufacturing
Operations & Control Level 3 - Manufacturing
Dispatching Production, Detailed Production operations
Scheduling, Reliability Assurance,etc ...
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The information detailed in the data flow model includes:
Because the object model is very detailed, it is difficult to use it to understand the general collections
of information. There are over 50 different objects in 8 separate models defined in the ISA95.01 object
model. In order to make the information more understandable, the objects can be collected into
general categories: resource definitions, production capabilities, product definition, production
performance, and production schedule. These categories of information exchanges are defined using
a common definition of personnel, equipment, materials, and segment definitions.
Business Planning
and Costing Functions
Defined u
Personne sing
l, Equipm
Material, ent,
and Segm
resource ent
definition
s
Pr hed
bil ion
Pr orm
es
iti t
s
od
Pe
Sc
c
on
t
od
De rodu
iti
Ca duc
uc le
rf
uc nce
tio
fin
o
tio
P
pa
u
Pr
n
a
n
Manufacturing
Operations
Figure 2 - Exchanged Information Categories
• Resource Definitions – The definition of the personnel, material, and equipment resource
definitions used in the other models. This also includes a definition of the segments of production
as seen by the business.
• Product Definition Information – This contains information about the resources and segments
required to make a product
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• Production Capability Information – This contains information about current and future capabilities
of production for personnel, equipment, and material. It defines capabilities that are available for
production.
• Production Schedule – This is a definition of what products are to be made. It may contain start or
completion times, and it may define the resources (personnel, equipment, and material) to be
used in production.
• Production Performance – This contains the results of production, as defined by actual personnel,
equipment, and material used per production segment, per product or scheduled item.
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• Equipment requirement property • Segment response
• Material produced requirement • Production data
• Material produced requirement • Personnel actual
property • Personnel actual property
• Material consumed requirement • Equipment actual
• Material consumed requirement • Equipment actual property
property • Material produced actual
• Consumable expected • Material produced actual property
• Consumable expected property • Material consumed actual
• Material consumed actual property
Production performance object models • Consumables actual
• Production performance • Consumables actual property
• Production response
Part 2 of the ANSI/ISA 95 standard defines attributes for each object. For example, a material sublot
could contain:
Figure 3 illustrates the mapping used to convert the object information to XML schemas. Each dotted
collection is an XML schema element.
Information About Information About Information About
Material Classes Material Definitions Material Lots & Sublots
0..n
Has Has Has
properties properties values for
of of May be made up
of sublots
Material
Material Material
Material Material
Material Lot
Lot
Class Definition Maps to
Class Definition Property
Property
Property May Property Is associated
Property Property
map to with a
Is tested 1..n Is tested 1..n 0..n
by a by a Records the
execution of QA
QA Test
Test
QA
QA Test
Test Result
Result
0..n 0..n
Specification
Specification Defines a
0..n procedure for
obtaining a
Information
About QA Tests
Figure 3 – Example of XML mapping of exchanged objects
There are multiple methods available to exchange XML documents. These range from simple e-mail,
FTP transfers, SOAP (Simple Object Application Protocol), or OPC-XML exchange.
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5 MODELS OF MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS
Defining the exchanged information is only part of the problem associated with business to
manufacturing integration. Manufacturing operations systems must also coordinate and manage real
time control systems as well as integrate transaction based business systems. The ISA SP95
committee has started working on Part 3, Models of Manufacturing Operations, to address this area.
Part 3 will define models for the disparate collection of activities that must occur in manufacturing
operations for effective and efficient manufacturing. The goal is to provide manufacturing companies a
common model they can use to describe requirements to vendors, and to allow companies to compare
alternate architectures and solutions. The committee’s plan is to use the MESA and Purdue models of
manufacturing operations as a basis for the work, but to have it formal enough to allow vendors to
define interoperable products.
Part 3 of the standard defines a model of manufacturing operations, extending the MESA (MES
Association) models to include all of the activities involved in manufacturing operations. Even though
Part 3 is still in draft form, it is already being used my many control vendors as a blueprint for their
MES solutions. The Part 3 model also helps manufacturing professionals understand the activities
and functions necessary for correct and complete integration with business logistics, maintenance,
and quality systems.
Because Part 3 is still in an early draft form, the names given to activity sets and the complete
definitions of the activities are not yet complete. The currently defined activity model is shown in
Figure 4.
Detailed
Production
Scheduling
Resource Production
Management Tracking
Product Historical
Process
Definition Data
Analysis
Management Management
Production
Execution Production
Analysis
Process Manual
Monitoring Operations
Automated
Control
• Production Scheduling - Defines the creation of local production plans for locally managed
resources based on business production requirements.
• Resource Management - Defines the managing and allocating locally controlled resources.
• Production Dispatching - Defines dispatching batches to process cells, dispatching machine
startup instructions, and inventory control instructions.
• Production Execution - Includes batch execution, manual operations, and setup of automated
control.
• Production Tracking - Includes converting equipment information to production information
associated with specific production requirements.
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• Historical Data Management - Managing continuous information, discrete data, and batch logs for
analysis use.
• Product Analysis - Analysis of product quality, such as quality assurance.
• Process Analysis - Analysis of process performance and efficiency.
• Production Analysis - Analysis of production performance and efficiency.
• Process Monitoring - Monitoring the process to ensure safe and efficient operation
• Product Definition Management - Managing the information required to manufacture products
• Automated Control - Some operations of automated control, usually dealing with high level
optimization are performed as Level 3 functions.
• Manual Operations - Some manual operations, usually dealing with the dispatching of instructions
and logging of responses are performed as Level 3 functions.
Similar activity models are being defined for maintenance and quality operations, as illustrated in
Figure 5.
Maintenance Quality
Scheduling Scheduling
Maintenance Quality
Maintenance Quality
Asset Resource
Tracking Tracking
Management Management
Maintenance Quality
Dispatching Dispatching
Maintenance Quality
Execution Execution
The ISA SP95 committee is continuing work on Part 3 of the standard and has discussed a possible
Part 4, to describe the information exchanged between the activities of manufacturing operations. The
Part 3 work is expected to take 12 to 18 months before a final committee draft is available.
The World Batch Forum (www.wbf.org) has formed a working group to develop XML schemas for the
Part 1 object model, using the Part 2 attributes. This working group has delivered the first draft of the
schema definitions and is in the process of testing the schemas, converting them to the new W3C
XML schema standard, and generating the documentation of the schemas. This work should be
completed by the end of 2001 or in early 2002.
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CONCLUSIONS
There are major business benefits that can come from business to manufacturing integration, provided
that the reasons for integration are driven defined by business needs. Business to manufacturing
integration can support Available To Promise (ATP), Activity Based Costing (ABC), reduction of in-
work inventory, and supply chain optimization processes. The ANSI/ISA-95 Enterprise/Control
System Integration standards provide a good model to address integration. It provides a framework
for companies to apply to internal integration projects, and a set of XML schemas is being developed
to assist in technology integration.
REFERENCES
ANSI/ISA 95.00.01-2000, Enterprise/Control System Integration – Part 1: Models and Terminology
COX III, James F.; BLACKSTONE Jr, John H.: APICS Dictionary Ninth Edition, APICS - Falls Church
VA, ISBN 1-55822-162-X
MESA International, MES Functionalities and MRP to MES Data Flow Possibilities - White Paper
Number 2 (1994)
WILLIAMS, T.J.: The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture, A Technical Guide for CIM Planning
and Implementation, 1992, ISA, ISBN 1-55617-265-6
PRACTICAL REFERENCES
BROWN, Mark Graham; BALDRIGE, Malcolm: How to Interpret the Malcolm Baldrige 1995 Award
Criteria, National Quality Award 1995 & 1996 Award Criteria
GOLDRATT, Eliyahu M: The Goal, North River Press, Inc. 1992 ISBN 0-88427-061-0
AUTHOR’S INFORMATION
Dennis Brandl
Sequencia Corporation
208 Townsend Ct
Suite 100
Cary, NC 27511
USA
Phone Number +1-919-852-5399
Fax: +1-919-852-5322
E-mail: [email protected]
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