MESA International
Global Education Program announces first date of B2MML & Integration Fundamentals Program
MESA International is offering its first ever B2MML & Integration Fundamentals program on September 9, 2013 in Raleigh, NC. The one-day course will cover the fundamentals in plant-to-enterprise integration using B2MML and ISA-95 standards, and offers participants a MESA Certificate of Competency for successful completion.
This class is intended for those starting, thinking about or currently supporting an integration project. It covers all of the important aspects of integration, and also highlights how real users of the B2MML standard have used it to completely automate ERP to MES integration.
Defining an Operations Systems Architecture
MESA White Paper #44, Defining an Operations Systems Architecture published.
Information systems provided by industrial software vendors are evolving constantly with new features and implementation strategies. The complexity and variety of available options make it difficult for many manufacturers to adequately discuss and compare software alternatives that may or may not meet their requirements.
Vendors typically promote architectures that are supported by the products or solutions in their suite or toolbox. If a manufacturer does not have a clear vision for the architecture of its operations systems, it often adopts the vendor’s approach. This approach may be the best fit for the system being developed; however, in many cases it is not or the vendor’s solution is not configured correctly.
In the absence of a target “To-Be” architecture, the vendor approach is inevitable. With the increasing reliance on system agility and associated operations management capability, the need to raise the bar is evident. Best-in-class manufacturers must be able to understand their production processes and structures as a foundation for actual process improvement. Once understood, the As-Is and target To-Be architectures serve as a common basis for the discussion and mapping of alternatives.
This paper presents techniques for describing operations systems and engaging stakeholders in projects based on product-independent architectures with examples.
This MESA White Paper is also published in the methodology best practices collection, The MOM Chronicles: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 3.0 (Published by ISA, February 2013).
Applying Manufacturing Operations Models
Also published is MESA White Paper #45:
Applying Manufacturing Operations Models In A Discrete Hybrid Manufacturing Environment.
The paper explains a requirements definition method using ISA-95 Part 3 modeling techniques to describe the integration of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) as part of MOM into enterprise manufacturing architecture. The MES functions, by definition, are part of MOM system architecture, which complements the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems by providing essential information for production and support operations. This is a foundational user requirement for the company’s operations transformation to a fully integrated operations environment to reduce dependence on manual data entry and to improve data integrity into the extended enterprise from manufacturing sites.
The paper has two sections. The first section is background information describing (1) the domain of discrete hybrid manufacturing operations with the three main types of operations applications that support operations in most companies and their touch points and (2) the system design and execution required to implement MES/MOM using a model-driven approach based on the ANSI/ISA-95 series of standards.
The second section is a discussion about the advantages of applying an operations model approach to manufacturing operations. The section describes the operations advantages of running with an integrated electronic records system instead of a paper-based system.
This MESA White Paper is also be published in the methodology best practices collection, The MOM Chronicles: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 3.0 (Published by ISA, February 2013)
