ISA-95

The complexity of industrial and other forms of manufacturing is considerable. It takes engineers years to design machines and factories that can efficiently process millions of products. The machinery requires advanced computer systems and special programs. Furthermore there are extremely complicated hierarchies of systems that have to be identified and understood. Few of us realize just how complicated it is to make all of the parts and to organize them appropriately. In the recent past it became necessary to come up with a system to organize and name all of the parts of the systems. When something broke it made it that much easier to figure out what was wrong. One of the great international standards that was invented is the ANSI/SA-95 which provides a complicated hierarchy of details and terms to use in manufacturing processes such as continuous, repetitive, and batch processes.

The sorts of benefits that ISA-95 provides are not just for manufacturers, they are also for the suppliers who provide materials for the manufacturing process. It is imperative that producers and suppliers in the manufacturing industry be able to speak the same language. It is also very important from the perspective of engineers and workers within a particular manufacturing plant to be able to communicate with each other. The process also needs to be organized from a top down system. You need a basic process with various parts and activities on lower levels. Each of the systems need to be integrated and communicating with controls. Controls are what change the system so that more or less input comes into the system. If there is too much coming in to the system the controller slows things down. It can also speed up the system when necessary. The system is much like a thermostat that adjusts the heat when necessary. The ISA are the standards that keep all of these things working together.

There are some basic parts to the ISA-95 model. The first part of the ISA model is a standard for terminology and object models. The standards help to govern the way that information is used and exchanged between parts of the system. The second part of the ISA-95 is the object model provides some attributes for each object that is in part one. Part three works to provide a place for the description of different production sites throughout the process. Naturally the process has many different parts that work on different levels and that need to be compared continuously. Step four is used to work out communications between the different systems. Obviously the different parts need to be in communication and in exchange with each other. Part five provides information for connecting all of the processes to the office systems meant to run and monitor them.

As you can see, the process is complicated but the ISA-95 is naturally made to organize the process and make it simpler. It allows a great deal more communication between parts than would normally occur. Without an ISA system it would be very difficult to integrate all of the systems and to monitor them. It would also be very difficult for manufacturers to communicate with each other and it would certainly be a serious problem to keep any communications between suppliers and producers. It is always important to remember that manufacturing is something carried out between a producer and a supplier. Without raw materials the producer cannot function, and the supplier needs to know what to provide. These are the sorts of things that the ISA helps to facillitate, and by doing so it makes them all much easier.