Industry groups, alliances collaborate for top-floor/shop-floor interoperability

The name is both descriptive and prescriptive: Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group. Comprised of members from five organizations, their collective goal is to foster greater interoperability by ensuring individual endeavors are harmonious rather than at cross currents.

Doing so benefits solutions vendors attempting to deliver interoperable technology—but more important, end-user companies that would reap the benefit of reduced costs, effort, and time in achieving business value from such solutions.

These members make up the working group:

• Instruments Society of America (ISA)
• World Batch Forum (WBF)
• Open Applications Group (OAGi)
• Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (Mimosa); and
• OLE for Process Control (OPC)

“Our strategy is to take interoperability standards from the top floor or enterprise-system level all the way to the shop floor and come up with a set of best business practices for industry and technology vendors,” says Gary Sullivan, chairman of the working group. “The goal is to accelerate adoption of standards in systems, cut the cost of integration between systems, and reduce implementation times. The work we're doing is critical in the new era of service-oriented architecture [SOA]. This convergence of moving standards into a common framework could have tremendous impact.”

Tom Burke, OPC president and executive director, concurs. “We want to eliminate confusion for end users and vendors around multiple standards and how they pick and choose what they need to implement,” says Burke. “There is overlap, but also synergy. Let's make sure we're on the same page, so that standards are worth more than the paper they're printed on.”

Chip Lee, director of publishing and leader of manufacturing standards activity within ISA, is spearheading the effort.

“The goal is to consolidate standards from the different organizations into a single standard, or develop mapping documents for how they work together,” explains Lee. “Normalization of the various standards could end up in a single document of best-of-breed practices, or as a road map from one standard to another. The committee is in the process of working out which is the best approach for industry.”

Lee says either approach—or a combination of the two—ultimately could provide companies with a means to preserve current investments while reducing costs and efforts around future ones.

The goal, concludes Sullivan, is to have a guideline written by May 2007. “We're dealing with different constituents, so there's a lot of give and take,” he says. “It's tough but exciting work.”