Wade Harsy

"But if you think about it, sending an order from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to a lower-level system and reporting consumption while you're fulfilling orders are the same, regardless of the product you're making," notes Wade Harsy, president of Integrated Process Automation & Control Technologies, (IPACT), a systems integrator in Valparaiso, Ind., that installs Wonderware software."It doesn't matter if you're making tires, candy, planes or plastic bottles."

Harsy's company has been able to exploit such similarities, thanks to the international standards that have evolved for automation over the past decade or so."Using standards brings a lot of commonality that helps us tremendously in delivering and supporting automation systems," reports Harsy.They cut development costs, shorten implementation, improve quality and streamline maintenance.These benefits prompted IPACT to join the growing ranks of manufacturers and equipment suppliers committed to international standards.

Because of this commitment while developing software for the Boeing 787 project, the integrator was able to reuse some of the non-proprietary subcomponents in similar software that it developed later for a chocolate manufacturer."The ability to leverage prior work gives us more transportability from one application to another," says Harsy."It allows us to use a leaner staff on subsequent projects."

As an integrator specializing in the enterprise-to-process boundary, IPACT relies heavily on communications standards that define variables and organize communications in this space.Among the most important are the ISA-95 enterprise-to-control system standard and the ISA-88 batch-control standard developed by the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA), in Research Triangle Park, N.C. "Not only are we using the right characters, we're also using the right syntax and structure," says Harsy.

Because ISA-95 establishes a general structure for data models, IPACT still must do quite a bit of custom work to apply those extensible markup language (XML) structures to specific plants.For this work, it turns to the Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) being advanced by the WBF organization, an ISA affiliate.This standard builds on ISA-95 to offer further guidance in integrating enterprise-wide business systems with manufacturing systems."[ISA-95] provides structure for the text of a message, but B2MML goes a step further by standardizing the nature of the use of the message," explains Harsy.
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"Abstracting the requirements of each application and projecting them onto the model can be difficult until you get a fair bit of experience," says Harsy at IPACT.

Wade Harsy