by Gary Mintchell | Dec 16, 2014 | Automation, Industrial Computers, Interoperability, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
OK, the title of this post is also the title of Schneider Electric Software Vice President Tim Sowell’s blog. I follow his blog closely. He offers deep thinking about operations management applications and the drivers, requirements and needs that affect their development.
In his latest post, he’s reflecting on both year-end planning and the evolution of what we have been calling MES.
He begins by noticing, “The labels we have used for years for products, spaces, and roles no longer mean the same thing. We rapidly find ourselves setting up a glossary of labels and what they will mean in 2020-25 in order to gain alignment.”
He starts with the label “MES”, but my involvement with the space goes back to 1977 and something called MRP II. So the evolution began before that, but it started to come together in 1990. “The label ‘MES’ was first introduced in 1990 to refer to a point application at a single site (typically Quality Management). Over the next 20 years, more functionality was added to MES to keep pace with Automation trends.”
MES Platforms, Schneider Electric Software
The next evolution Sowell dates from 2010-2015. There is the introduction of the term MOM which came from the work of ISA 95. Sowell also quotes the definition from Gartner Group in 2012, “For many, MES is no longer a point application, but a platform that serves a dual purpose: integrating multiple business processes within a site and across the manufacturing network, and creating an enterprise manufacturing execution capability.”
Looking at today and tomorrow, “As the industrial computing paradigm shifts to the Internet, the platform is now being leveraged for other assets distributed across the interconnected value chain while extending the rich optimization functionality via new applications to get more productivity in areas outside of manufacturing.”
The problems increasing gained complexity as the requirements moved from a single machine or line went to many lines in one plant to standards to compare across the lines of many plants. “It was then that I realized in the meetings internally I could not use the word MES generically and needed to become specific.”
Sowell rightly concludes, “It is much easier to avoid labels and define the situation scenario / role, and start the meeting or strategy session laying out the landscape for discussion, gain alignment on the ‘desired outcome’ and destination first, it makes it easier!!!!”
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 12, 2014 | News, Operations Management, Software
MOM Chronicles: ISA95 Best Practices
The International Society of Automation (ISA) Publications Department has awarded Charlie Gifford the Thomas G. Fisher Award of Excellence for a Standards-Based Reference Publication. The book, which Gifford assembled and edited, is “The MOM Chronicles: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 3.0”.
I have the book and highly recommend it to all who are trying to understand and implement the ideas and models of ISA95—the international standard for the integration of enterprise and control systems. Charlie is an internationally respected practitioner and teacher on manufacturing operations management (MOM).
Charlie offers this comment on the honor, “I sincerely thank ISA for this prominent award named for a distinguished man, Tom Fisher. As Primary Contributing Author and Chief Editor, I accept this award for all 50 contributing expert authors and reviewers of the ISA-95 Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) Best Practices Working Group. This is the 2nd time the working group’s work products have been recognized for this award. In 2011, ‘When World Collide in Manufacturing Operations, Book 2.0’ was also selected. ISA continues to support the group’s work products of 23 applied technology white papers and 3 books. These documents enable manufacturing systems professionals worldwide to become a primary reference resource over the last 10 years.”
Here is a glimpse into MOM Chronicles:
- Chapter 1: Applying Global MOM Systems in a Manufacturing 2.0 Approach
- Chapter 2: The Role of Semantic Models in Smarter Industrial Operations
- Chapter 3: Applying Manufacturing Operations Models in a Discrete Hybrid Manufacturing Environment
- Chapter 4: Defining an Operations Systems Architecture
- Chapter 5: A Workflow-driven Approach to MOM
- Chapter 6: Scheduling Integration Using an ISA-95 Application in a Steel Plant
- Chapter 7: Intelligent Integration Interface: I3, A Real-world Application of ISA-95
Here’s a glimpse into When Worlds:
- Chapter 1: SOA for Manufacturing Overview
- Chapter 2: Data Architecture for MOM: The Manufacturing Master Data Approach
- Chapter 3: Building a Manufacturing Transformation Strategy with ISA-95 Methods
- Chapter 4: Work Process Management for Adaptive Manufacturing
- Chapter 5: B2MML, Integration Patterns, and Data Mapping
- Chapter 6: Integration of Manufacturing Intelligence with MOM
- Chapter 7: Lifecycle of Service Creation using the ISA-95 MOM
Charlie Gifford, PMP, is General Manager & Senior Advanced Manufacturing Consultant at Intelligent Manufacturing Institute, 21st Century Manufacturing Solutions LLC.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 15, 2014 | Automation, Data Management, Manufacturing IT, News, Operations Management, Software, Technology
Furthering consolidation of the MES space, Siemens (the PLM division) announced agreement to acquire manufacturing software developer Camstar Systems. Siemens, in its press release, says “the acquisition will build on Siemens’ industrial digitalization strategy by broadening its integrated product development and production automation solutions for the electronics, semiconductor and medical device industries.”
I am a little surprised by the announcement, because I had the impression that Siemens was downplaying the MES space. No comments, just observation. But the PLM group has been pretty aggressively pursuing the Siemens dream of digital manufacturing–something that fits within the German government’s initiative of “Industrie 4.0”. The group’s leadership is solid and its ability to integrate acquisitions is outstanding. This will be a real benefit for the company.
I asked noted industry analyst Julie Fraser, principal of Iyno Advisors, for an opinion. Here are her comments:
“There are always challenges with keeping product, sales and customer momentum after an acquisition, and small private company employees may not be comfortable in one of the largest companies in the world. I always worry about those “people-centric” factors having seen it go awry many times in the past. However, The logic for both parties and synergy is pretty clear: Camstar gains deep resources worldwide to expand its business both in MES and in Supply Chain-wide analytics of product data. Siemens gains the leadership position in MES for both semiconductor back end operations and medical devices, a US-based MES presence, as well as leading-edge product data analytics designed to cross the product lifecycle and supply chain. Clearly Camstar was on a performance path that made them a very attractive acquisition target, and Siemens has been pushing not only into MES, but also into MES for discrete industries more recently. Siemens PL has experience with acquisitions, and some have been more successful than others. The Siemens stated intention to leave Camstar and is brands intact is the path they actually pursue, I see quite a bit of upside both for the company and the people involved. If this succeeds as they envision, it will significantly accelerate their progress toward a vision they set forth many years ago with the acquisition of ORSI in 2001.”
According to the press release: Camstar’s enterprise MES portfolio delivers scalable, flexible, enterprise-wide solutions for centralized or distributed multi-site manufacturing environments. The Camstar portfolio includes next-generation, high-performance analytics to gain insight into the operations of complex and global processes. This cloud-based capability leverages state-of-the-art, big data technology across the operations and global supply chain of the enterprise.
“The addition of the Camstar team and products represents the latest step in Siemens’ focus on delivering industry leading, comprehensive functionality and the deep expertise needed to support our customers’ digital enterprises,” said Chuck Grindstaff, president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software. “The addition of Camstar’s solutions will further accelerate our integration of PLM with the Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) domain. In the integrated digital enterprise, we are enabling PLM, MOM and industrial automation to work together to help customers realize innovation in their products and processes throughout the value chain. Camstar’s unique value and industry-centric approach complements the Siemens strategy for the MOM domain and will be a welcomed addition to our premier MES brand, SIMATIC IT.”
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 18, 2014 | Automation, Data Management, News, Operations Management, Organizations, Standards, Technology
OGI Pilot
MIMOSA, an Operations and Maintenance Information Open System Alliance association, held its annual meeting last week at the Chevron Innovation Center in Houston.
The most amazing thing about MIMOSA, the organization, and the Oil&Gas Interoperability Pilot specifically, is the amount of progress they have made over the past few years. Some of the work has been ongoing for over a decade. Emphases have shifted over time reflecting the needs of the moment and the readiness of technology.
MIMOSA is a not-for-profit trade association dedicated to developing and encouraging the adoption of open information standards for Operations and Maintenance in manufacturing, fleet, and facility environments. MIMOSA’s open standards enable collaborative asset lifecycle management in both commercial and military applications.
Interoperability, not integration
The theme was manufacturing software interoperability from design to operations and maintenance. I use the term manufacturing in a generic sense, because I couldn’t find a more general, yet specific, term. The initial impetus for this work lies in the oil & gas industry.
MIMOSA’s strategy is a “federation of standards” approach. It does not try to write standards for every model, data, or object. It incorporates existing standards and attempts to tie them together into a workable system.
The beauty of this lies in the ability to just use data models from a variety of relevant sources and focus on the needs of owner/operators.
The OGI Pilot demonstration project, first unveiled in 2012 at ISA Automation Week, revealed that it is possible to pass live data from the engineering system (Aveva, Bentley, Intergraph in this case) into an operations & maintenance database (see the image accompanying the article).
Solves big headache
The beauty of the system is that as-designed data can be passed to operations. With proper business processes and management of change, updates can be made live. This means that when the project moves to handover and start up, engineers and technicians can find information they need quickly and can have a high degree of trust in that data. The way it is today, pdfs of the engineering data are handed over. These are hard to search. They are also hard to keep current.
Non-threatening
Two roadblocks have stood in the way of progress. One is that the voice of the owner/operator is often fragmented. They often settle for totally proprietary solutions entailing custom programming at great expense and little assurance of reliability. The other is the reluctance on the part of suppliers (understandably) to be told by a standard how to write their data.
Using the federated standards approach with what I’ll call translators, each software application can expose data in a format that allows interchange with other software applications without anyone tinkering with what’s “under the hood.”
Other standards organizations have failed on this latter point. They have tried to construct a standard that forced products to commodity status. This not only threatens suppliers, it also threatens innovation. The MIMOSA / OGI approach does away with that constraint.
We are starting to get to where the owner/operators need the technology to be. This work will benefit everyone.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 19, 2014 | Automation, Marketing, News, Operations Management, Security, Software
Unsubscribe
I sometimes do some consulting on digital marketing and have noticed something about the “unsubscribe” feature in distributed email news. Companies provide a number of ways to unsubscribe from newsletters. Some are easy to find. You click, it takes you to a Website, it says “unsubscribed.”
Others hide the unsubscribe link through one of a variety of ways. They may not use the word. The word may not be linked and the link is hard to find, i.e., not underlined or in a different color.
It has been a year since I left Automation World, but they kept my email address alive and forwarded the messages. After a year with an autoreply from my replacement, the only emails I’m getting are newsletters and PR announcements that no longer apply to me.
After leaving day-to-day work at Maintenance Technology, I decided to make a concentrated effort to unsubscribe from everything with the automationworld.com address. I’ve been at it five weeks. My email load is down 75% between that and no more internal communications. What a relief it is!
What do you feel about the unsubscribe process? Or do you ever clean out your inbox occasionally?
Software suppliers expanding footprint
My friend Julie Fraser is an industry analyst specializing in Manufacturing Execution Systems / Manufacturing Operations Management (MES/MOM). Her last blog post looked at companies expanding from MES/MOM and also design into the world of supply chain management.
She rightly considers the major changes that move entails both internally to the supplier and also to the customers.
“Two prominent providers of manufacturing plant floor focused software have recently expanded their scope to include supply chain capabilities. Camstar has developed Omneo, and Dassault DELMIA, which includes Apriso, just announced its intent to buy Quintiq. These are big expansions of footprint, customer base, and markets.
“Expanding the frame of the problem can be very useful for customers and for software developers.
“Yet these moves are also surely going to put these companies out of their traditional comfort zones. The sales model will need to be different, and the marketing as well.
“Expanding the scope of your vision about what constitutes operations is always a good idea. Make everyone part of the solution and your operations can truly become an efficient and effective part of your business.”
Expanding your vision is almost always a good thing. Bringing additional people into the conversation—people who often have been at odds with each other—is an interesting challenge.
ICS CyberSecurity Conference
I missed the news that Joe Weiss sold his industrial control system cyber security conference to Security magazine. Notice of this year’s iteration just reached me. The ICS Cyber Security Conference will be held October 20-23 in Atlanta.
Weiss says, “It has become paramount that critical infrastructures balance the needs of ICS reliability and safety with cyber security.”
MESA welcomes new sponsor
MESA International announced that Stone Technologies Inc., a national systems integration company focused on project delivery, has joined MESA as a Gold Keystone Sponsor.
“We feel that MESA is the definitive voice for our industry and Stone wants to add its voice to the choir,” said Tom Bruhn, vice president, Advanced Manufacturing Solutions, Stone Technologies. “By partnering with MESA as a Keystone Sponsor, we are better positioned to help influence the markets we serve through education and innovation.”
