Plant-to-Business (P2B) Interoperability Using the ISA-95 Standard 17

PLANT-TO-BUSINESS (P2B)
INTERROPERABILITY USING
THE ISA-95 STANDARD
EMERSON Dave
*1
KAWAMURA Haruhisa
*2
MATTHEWS Wayne
*3
ISA-95 is now highlighted as a standard interface specification to secure
interoperability for P2B (Plant-to-Business). We have developed an integration
platform according to this standard to integrate ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) in short term and low cost.
*1 Yokogawa US Development Center
*2 Yokogawa Electric Corporation
*3 Yokogawa Marex Limited
INTRODUCTION
G
lobal market pressures are causing businesses world
wide to strive to lower manufacturing costs and to become
more agile companies in order to quickly respond to changes in
market demands and to fend off competitive threats. Yokogawa's
customers in all industries and markets are responding to this
pressure by working to more closely integrate their plant
manufacturing systems with their enterprise wide business
systems in a seamless manner. This integration has historically
been very difficult and costly to accomplish. Recently a standards
based approach has been recognized as a more efficient method to
integrate these disparate systems.
This paper discusses how the manufacturing industry is
responding to these pressures by using the ISA-95 standard to
integrate their plant and business systems and how Yokogawa has
responded to our customer's needs by offering products and
services to help them accomplish their business goals.
CURRENT STATE OF P2B INTEGRATION
TECHNOLOGY AND MARKET
Major manufacturing companies, like companies in other
industries, use a type of computer system called Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) systems to automate typical business
functions such as accounting and financial reporting, human
resources, and purchasing. In manufacturing companies ERP
systems have been extended to be used for ordering raw
materials, tracking work in progress, and coordinating the
shipment of finished goods to customers. This has lead to the use
of ERP systems in coordinating with upstream and downstream
supply chain partners.
Manufacturing companies have long desired to better
integrate their manufacturing plants, often widely distributed
geographically, within their ERP system. The key manufacturing
plant systems to be integrated with ERP systems are
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Process
Automation Systems (PAS). Depending upon the industry the
terminology may differ, for example in discrete manufacturing
industries the term MES is widely used as they usually do not
have the sophisticated PAS systems found in most process
manufacturing plants. Yokogawa's process customers usually
want to integrate their CENTUM CS 3000 Distributed Control
Systems (DCS) and Exaquantum Plant Information Management
Systems (PIMS) with their ERPs as these systems perform the
MES system functions. In this paper, we will use the term MES to
refer to our customers PAS and PIMS systems.
There are many suppliers of ERP systems and some
companies utilize proprietary in-house developed business
systems. However, one company, SAP, has the largest market
share, specifically in the process industries where the clear
majority of process manufacturers use the SAP ERP system.
18 Yokogawa Technical Report English Edition, No. 43 (2007)
Other leading ERP suppliers in western markets are Oracle,
Microsoft, and Infor.
Historically manufacturing companies have attempted to
integrate their ERP and MES systems with little success and often
high cost. In the late 1980's and early 1990's the term Computer
Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) was popular. Many companies
attempted to implement CIM systems and while there were
successes the point-to-point custom integration software proved
to be more expensive and difficult to implement and maintain
than the rate of return would justify, as evidenced by the lack of
adoption of CIM in the mid and late 1990's. In 2004 SAP
estimated that among the manufacturing customers using SAP's
ERP software there were approximately 14,000 manufacturing
sites, yet less than 10% of those sites were integrated with the
ERP. This figure is likely to be accurate industry wide, not just
among SAP users.
In recent years there has been recognition among
manufacturing companies, ERP suppliers and MES suppliers that
the previously used customized, point-to-point interfaces are not
an adequate solution. Instead there is a strong need to have
interoperability between these systems based upon widely
adopted standards. Supporting this trend has been a growing
demand by business executive for real-time, manufacturing
oriented, key performance indicators (KPIs) to make the current
plant status more visible to business managers. In the mid 1990's
the ISA, an automation industry professional organization,
started developing a new standard called ISA-95 to address these
needs.
The release of the ISA-95 standard in 2000, updated in 2001
and 2006 coincided with the IT industries move to XML
(eXtensible Markup Language) and the use of web services to
exchange business data, both internally within a business and
externally or B2B (Business-to-Business). There is a strong trend
developing among all types of companies, including process
manufacturers, to use standards based data exchange using web
services and XML in order to make the exchange of all types of
data more efficient, lower cost and more agile, or easy to adapt to
changing business needs.
ISA-95 ENTERPRISE CONTROL SYSTEM
STANDARD
The ISA-95 standard is a consensus standard developed by
the ISA's Standards & Practices Committee Number 95 (SP95).
The SP95 committee is made up of representatives from
manufacturing companies, MES system suppliers (including
Yokogawa), ERP system suppliers and industry consultants. The
ISA is also affiliated with ANSI (American National Standards
Institute) and IEC/ISO, so the standard is also a U.S. standard as
well as an international standard. The international version is
called IEC-62264 and is a dual logo IEC/ISO standard, although
globally it is typically referred to as ISA-95.
The goal of the SP95 committee in developing the standard
was to reduce the risk, cost, and errors associated with
implementing interfaces between business and manufacturing
operations & control functions. This would enable enterprise
systems and control systems to inter-operate and be easily
integrated.
The ISA-95 standard is a multi-part standard. Parts 1, 2 and 5
define the exchange of production data between business and
plant systems. Parts 3 and 4 will address typical MES functions
and expand the work done in parts 1, 2 and 5 by additionally
defining the exchange of maintenance, inventory and quality data
between business and plant systems.
The ISA-95 standard provides a high level, logical, model for
organizing the exchange of data between business and plant
Figure 1 ISA-95 Categories of Production Management Information
Business planning &
logistics information
Plant production scheduling,
operational management, etc.
Resource
Information
(Personnel,
Equipment,
Material,
Segments)
Production
capability
information
(What resources
are available)
Product
definition
information
(What must be
defined to make
a product)
Production
schedule
information
(What to
make and use)
Production
response
information
(What was
made and used)
Manufacturing operations &
control information
Production operations, maintenance
operations, quality operations, etc.
Plant-to-Business (P2B) Interoperability Using the ISA-95 Standard 19
systems. Figure 1 shows the categories of production
management information the ISA-95 standard defines for
exchange between business and manufacturing systems. This
standard approach to organizing data exchange is valuable for
planning and specifying integration projects.
The ISA-95 standard by itself is not sufficient for
implementation, this is why the WBF (World Batch Forum)
created the B2MML (Business To Manufacturing Markup
Language). B2MML is an XML implementation of the ISA-95
standard that provides a common XML data structure for use by
ERP and MES vendors as well as manufacturing companies.
B2MML has been adopted by most major process automation
suppliers and by SAP thereby providing wide adoption in the
process industries. As an XML implementation B2MML is
compatible with web services which fit in well with the shift to
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) by major manufacturing
companies.
Functionally the most widely used facet of ISA-95 and
B2MML are the download of production schedules from ERP
systems to MES systems and the upload of production
performance information from MES systems to ERP systems.
This key functionality enables corporate level planning and
scheduling functions to have an automatic, two way, link with the
manufacturing system thereby enabling faster transfer of
manufacturing instructions (e.g. orders) to plants and the real-
time, or near real-time, transfer of actual manufacturing results to
business systems which are used for KPIs and increasing
management visibility into the plant.
After the key scheduling/performance facet of production
management is implemented many companies are looking to
increase the exchange of Plant Asset Management (PAM) data
between plant production/maintenance systems and Enterprise
Asset Management (EAM) systems. The enhanced exchange of
asset management data is expected to increase reliability,
providing business with more accurate plant capability forecasts
and reducing maintenance costs.
MDX (MANUFACTURING DATA EXCHANGE)
In response to our customer's requests for help integrating
their Yokogawa DCS and PIMS systems to their ERP systems we
have developed MDX (Manufacturing Data eXchange). MDX is
an integration platform that layers on top of CENTUM CS 3000
and Exaquantum providing standards based web service
interfaces to ERP systems, and if needed other MES systems.
MDX is designed as a COTS (Commercially Off The Shelf)
IT product in order to have it readily accepted by our customer's
IT departments. Key considerations are: support for XML; web
services; ability to operate in a network DMZ (a network area
separated with firewalls from all other systems); SOAP and major
IT platforms such as SAP's NetWeaver product. Acceptance by
our customer's IT departments is critical since MDX will not
operate in the isolated manufacturing domain where our control
system products function, rather, MDX will connect the
manufacturing domain with the enterprise domain, so it must be
easily accepted by both groups.
To aid in the acceptance by our traditional manufacturing
domain customers MDX supports standards such as ISA-95 and
B2MML which originated in this domain as well as support for
OPC which is the most widely adopted communication protocol
in the manufacturing domain. Support for OPC enables MDX to
work with any major PAS, PLC, or MES system, not just
Figure 2 Manufacturing Data eXchange (MDX) Architecture

OPC
ERP, MES, APS
Web
Service
Web
Service
Web
Service
Web
Service
Production
Schedule
Production
Performance
Yokogawa Systems
KPI Alert
MDX (Manufacturing Data Exchange) Server
Non-Yokogawa
Systems
PIMS, LIMS,...
MDX
Batch Client
MDX OPC
Schedule Client
MDX
Exaquantum Client
Exaquantum
CENTUM CS 3000 STARDOM DAQStation
Instruments
PLC, DCS,...
20 Yokogawa Technical Report English Edition, No. 43 (2007)
Yokogawa's products. Therefore Yokogawa's MDX product can
serve as the primary Plant-to-Business integration platform for a
company by using standards such as ISA-95, B2MML and OPC
to bridge the gaps between manufacturing and business systems.
Figure 2 shows the MDX architecture and how it can work with
different manufacturing systems using OPC while providing
standards based XML web service interfaces to ERP, or other
MES, systems.
MDX is designed to be a solution platform, currently
providing support for production management interfaces.
Extended support to include maintenance, inventory and quality
data is planned. The MDX design allows for additional XML
based standards to be supported with minimal changes to the
MDX product. MDX acts as a broker to receive and dispatch
application specific data between ERP systems and
manufacturing systems,
A typical type of data MDX can send to the ERP system is
KPI data to provide business managers with real-time visibility
into the manufacturing process. In conjunction with SAP,
Yokogawa has demonstrated passing KPI data from CENTUM
CS 3000 and Exaquantum to the SAP ERP system where it is
displayed in real-time on SAP's KPI displays. Figure 3 shows a
typical SAP NetWeaver Business Portal display of KPI data that
was calculated in CENTUM CS 3000 and Exaquantum and sent
to SAP for display. Building upon the data exchange technology
SAP and Yokogawa also demonstrated user interface integration
by displaying live CENTUM CS 3000 operator displays in the
SAP NetWeaver Business Portal as shown in Figure 4. This
visual integration enables our customers to make manufacturing
Figure 3 KPI Data from Exaquantum & CENTUM CS 3000 Figure 4 CENTUM CS 3000 Graphic in NetWeaver Portal
information available to the right person in the business no matter
where they are and helps to knock down traditional walls between
manufacturing and business groups. In 2006 MDX was certified
by SAP to be Powered by NetWeaver.
CONCLUSION
Process manufacturing companies are increasing activity to
integrate their plant and business systems. Yokogawa is
responding to this trend by developing products such as MDX
which can bridge the traditional gaps between the business and
manufacturing domains by supporting standards important to
each group. MDX provides a configurable solution platform for
Yokogawa's operation groups to build integration solutions for
our customers. It is our hope that our customers will find MDX
and a standards based approach to integration to be a desirable
and efficient business solution.
REFERENCES
(1) ISA, www.isa.org
(2) OPC Foundation, www.opcfoundation.org
(3) World Batch Forum, www.wbf.org
* 'NetWeaver', and 'Powered by SAP NetWeaver' are the
trademarks or registered trademarks of the German SAP
company.
* 'Exaquantum' and 'CENTUM' are the registered trademarks of
Yokogawa Electric Corporation.