ISA 95 White Paper.pdf - Final

ISA-95: A Foundation Model ForBusiness Intelligence for Manufacturing

PrefaceOne of the challenges encountered when implementing busi-ness intelligence solutions is ensuring that users can easily ac-cess the information they’re looking for. This can be especially important in manufacturing enterprises, where operational and business information tend to be incompatible.

The elements defined in the ISA-95 standard are useful build-ing blocks for configuring a manufacturing model. Although the ISA-95 standard was designed originally to facilitate information exchange, it also can be used as a model for organizing manu-facturing information as part of a business intelligence solution. Adoption of this standard can facilitate easier access to manu-facturing information to better support integration of enterprise and control systems.

ISA-95 organizes manufacturing information in a model that rep-resents equipment, material and personnel resources, products and the production process itself. This allows users who under-stand the business to find information without having to know the physical location or the source of the data.

This paper describes how users of Incuity EMI™, a business intelligence solution for manufacturing, can use ISA-95 elements to build a Unified Production Model (UPM) that truly reflects their manufacturing environment. The UPM organizes information from multiple disparate sources into logical structures that aid navigation and provide context. It can also be directly populated from business systems and manufacturing systems using the Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) and can send data to these systems using B2MML.

Business Intelligence for Manufacturing White PaperJuly 2008

by John Theron, VP Product Management

Incuity Software

Business Intelligence For ManufacturingThe investments that manufacturing companies have made in stan-dard business intelligence solutions have not typically resulted in better manufacturing decisions. That’s because typical business intel-ligence solutions tend to embrace traditional business data sources that were designed to enhance business applications such as sales, marketing, finance and human resource decisions.

Business intelligence solutions for manufacturing represent a different kind of challenge.

They, too, require the capabilities of mainstream business intelligence solutions, but they also need to integrate data from the control sys-tems, historians and human machine interface (HMI) systems de-ployed in the manufacturing environment. Typically, the business and manufacturing environments have been incompatible.

With massive investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, enterprise data warehouses and enterprise historians, most companies are reluctant to embark on yet another ‘green field’ project. They’d prefer to leverage the information assets they already have in their existing business systems. The best way to do this is to deploy

federated business intelligence solutions that can leave the data in these systems, surface it as needed by users, and warehouse it when appropriate.

Incuity EMI’s Unified ViewIncuity EMI is a business intelligence solution that helps enterprises make the most of their manufacturing information. Central to Incuity’s design is the ability to integrate information from multiple heteroge-neous sources into a single unified view of the manufacturing busi-ness, called the Unified Production Model (UPM).

The primary purpose of the Unified Production Model is to integrate data from the organization’s many different manufacturing data sourc-es, including:

• Control systems such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), distributed control systems (DCS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems;

• Manufacturing applications such as human-machine interface (HMI) systems, process historians, planning systems, mainte-nance management systems, manufacturing execution sys-tems (MES) and laboratory information management systems (LIMS);

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ISA-95: A Foundation Model For Business Intelligence for Manufacturing

• Business systems such as ERP systems, supply chain man-agement (SCM) systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and content management systems.

The UPM combines and consolidates the data from all of these sourc-es and presents it via a single, consistent interface that is indepen-dent of the data sources. Users don’t need to know where the data actually resides. They don’t need to navigate different user interfaces nor understand the many access protocols for the different data sources.

A Manufacturing Business ViewThe second purpose of the Unified Production Model is to organize the data to reflect the manufacturing business so that it’s more under-standable to users. Organizing data along manufacturing lines allows people to find information using business concepts such as equip-ment hierarchies and material groups instead of using IT concepts like table names and tag names.

Links and references in the UPM maintain data relationships and en-sure that users can access data with appropriate context. Data from one system (e.g., a temperature measurement) becomes more valu-able when seen in the context of data from other systems (e.g., what was being produced or who was the customer?).


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Figure 1.

A View of the Uni-fied Production Model (UPM)

The Unified Production Model can also store reports, dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), production scorecards and que-ries created by users across the enterprise, which makes it possible to reuse this content because the model provides a consistent inter-face that’s organized along business lines. For example, a report or KPI created for a production line with one type of control system can be run against a similar line with a different type of control system simply by changing the parameter that specifies the production line. The Unified Production Model also presents a consistent interface to applications that query the model, by abstracting the complexities of individual data sources.

ISA-95 Model As a Starting PointThe Unified Production Model can be developed from the ground up to represent any business operation, but it does represent a sig-nificant engineering effort. Although most manufacturing operations have much in common, it usually makes sense to use an industry standard as a starting point for creating a model.

There are many standards available that define business information structures, but good manufacturing standards are less common. The ISA-95 standard – which was developed jointly over several years by both manufacturers and suppliers – has gained the most traction because it’s broadly applicable across different manufacturing and production environments.

The ISA-95 standard models all key manufacturing elements. Re-source models cover the quantitative data on equipment, materials and personnel needed for production. The model also includes quali-tative information about the availability of these resources, how to make products, production schedules and production performance. ISA-95 therefore provides an excellent framework for organizing manufacturing information in a way that reflects virtually any manu-facturing business. This is why the Incuity Unified Production Model incorporates the complete set of elements and types defined in the ISA-95 standard and in the Business to Manufacturing Markup Lan-guage (B2MML).

ISA-95 Types & ItemsIncuity’s Unified Production Model is based on classes called types and instances of types called items. A pump is an example of a type, and Pump 101 is an example of an instance. Types can have proper-


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ties with simple data types (e.g., Boolean, double, string, mime, enu-merated, etc.) For example the pump property “Rated Output” would be of type double.

Types can also have reference and collection properties that define and constrain relationships with other types. The property “Pump Speed” might be a reference property pointing to a tag that measures pump speed. A connector to a control system might have a collec-tion property containing a collection of tags. Finally, types can have operations. For example a connector might expose an operation that synchronizes it with its data source.

Incuity EMI comes with libraries of predefined types, called packages. Users can choose to inherit from and extend existing types or to build new types from scratch to model the most complex manufacturing processes. Once a type has been defined, items (instances of this type) can be created in the Incuity namespace.

Incuity’s ‘ISA-95’ library introduces the following types to the model:

• Equipment types define both equipment and classes of equip-ment. Equipment maintenance information and equipment capability tests are also defined.

• Material types define materials, material definitions and class-es of material definitions.

• The model includes inventory of raw, intermediate and finished materials. Quality tests on material are also included.

• Personnel types define people, classes of personnel and quali-fications of personnel.

• Location types (the Equipment Hierarchy Model) define a hier-archy of equipment levels and locations.

• Process segment types define groupings of the equipment, material and personnel resources needed to carry out a pro-duction step.

• Production capability types define the capability (available, committed or unattainable) of equipment, material, personnel and process segment resources for a period of time.

• Product definition types define what equipment, material and personnel resources are needed to execute a product segment (production step) for a specified quantity of product. Product Definitions reference external Product Production Rules, Bill of Materials and Bill of Resources.


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• Production schedule types specify the definition and quantity of material to be produced, and the planned resources, loca-tion, start time and end time of production.

• Production performance types define the actual material pro-duced and resources used, and the actual start and end times of production.

Figure 2. An Example of a Segment Requirement

At the core of the Unified Production Model are some number of Incuity types that are always present. These include tag, time period, equipment, material, personnel and production types. ISA-95 types have been mapped to these core types so that items such as tags and time periods that are already defined in the namespace can be properties of ISA-95 items.

Evolving the ModelThe Unified Production Model supports general ISA-95 types and specific ISA-95 types.

General types are freeform types that inherit from ISA-95 base types, and are designed to allow users to create flexible items in the model browser.

For example, users can add an item of type ISA-95Equipment.Gener-alEquipment, and then add any number of properties and tags to the item. This equipment item can also contain a collection of other equip-ment items to reflect the equipment hierarchy. This allows users to quickly create items to model the manufacturing environment without defining new types.


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The disadvantage of using the general types is that there are no constraints on the number and types of properties and tags associ-ated with the equipment. Specific types provide these constraints and can be used to enforce model integrity. Specific types also inherit from ISA95 base types, but tightly specify their properties.

For example, equipment of type pump might be defined as having only two properties, a ‘Rated Output’ property of type double, and a ‘Pump Speed’ reference property.

Users often begin modeling with general types and progress to specif-ic types once the model is more fully understood. Users can continue to refine and extend the model by evolving new types based on exist-ing types as well as by creating new types from scratch.

Integration ServicesIncuity ‘connectors’ to control systems, historians, databases and applications collect data using a range of database connections, web services, OPC interfaces and proprietary interfaces. These connec-tors can leave the data at its source and surface the data as required, cache the data or warehouse the data depending on the data source.

Information about an equipment hierarchy might come from an asset management database. Real-time data describing the same equipment’s current behavior might come from a control system. Maintenance information about the equipment may be coming from a third source, a maintenance management system. The model serves as the framework for organizing the data from the many manufactur-ing data sources into structures that reflect the manufacturing enter-prise.

Analysis ServicesData in the model can be aggregated, summarized and further pro-cessed on either a scheduled or event driven basis.

Incuity can also orchestrate the data movement between control sys-tems and ERP systems. This can be done using the B2MML web ser-vices for receiving B2MML packages from control systems and ERP systems to populate the Unified Production Model. When the B2MML packages need to be ‘assembled’ from multiple sources, or when


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source systems do not have B2MML capabilities, Incuity can populate the Unified Production Model via standard connectors.

Incuity can also send B2MML packages to control systems, ERP sys-tems and other consumers of B2MML.

Presentation ServicesUsers access the Unified Production Model to analyze the manufac-turing business and create reports, dashboards, trends and graphs in Excel or via the analytical tools. These reports and dashboards are stored back into the Unified Production Model to ensure there is a single version of the truth. The reports and dashboards can be shared across the manufacturing enterprise by publishing them to the Incuity portal.

Pre-configured reports against ISA-95 structures (production perfor-mance reports, schedule reports, capability reports) provide insight into the manufacturing process.

Figure 3. An Equipment Capability Report

SummaryThe incorporation of ISA-95 elements into Incuity’s Unified Production Model allows organizations that adopt the ISA95 standard to benefit not only from improved ERP and control system integration, but also from a well conceived and broadly applicable framework for organiz-ing business intelligence for manufacturing. The end result is informa-tion aggregated from all sources and presented in proper context so that people can make better business decisions about operations.


IncuityEMI is a product of Incuity Software, a Rockwell Automation Company.

For more information on Incuity and its products, please go to www.incuity.com or contact us directly at [email protected].

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Documents

ISA 95 White Paper.pdf - Final