The Road to Integration

To run efficiently and cost effectively as well as ensure product quality, manufacturing control systems on the plant floor must be able to communicate with the enterprise systems. Materials must be purchased and delivered on time, personnel must be scheduled, equipment must be available and operating properly, recipes must be precise, processes must be tracked, and product quality must be monitored so that changes can be made--all in real time. The problem is this: each system in the process speaks a different language.

The ISA-95 Enterprise Control System Integration series of standards is a guide for creating the interfaces needed to bridge the language gap. It provides consistent terminology for the phases and steps throughout the process control layer and models for implementing the interfaces. The Road to Integration, Second Edition, explains how to use the principles, terminology, and information methods in the standard to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and manufacturing operations management (MOM) systems.

The authors discuss ISA-95 in the broader context of modern information exchange technologies and offer a complete picture for project managers, consultants, programmers, and information architects who want to integrate ERP and MOM/MES systems based on the international standard.