Manufacturing companies are continually striving to achieve and maintain a high level of operational excellence. Operational excellence requires continual improvement of a company’s manufacturing operations, driving them to become increasingly lean and agile.
To meet the goals of operational excellence, manufacturers must be able to fully utilize the information in all of their control and information systems. Achieving this level of utilization requires the ability to easily integrate these disparate control and information systems. Significant advances supporting these information exchange requirements have been made in recent years in the application areas of advanced process control, finite scheduling, asset management, statistical process control and supply chain integration. However the integration of Operations and Maintenance (O&M) related information has lagged behind these other areas of information exchange. This situation limits the opportunities to make important business operating decisions that are dependent upon integrated O&M information.
In today’s world of interdependent supply chain partners and O&M outsourcing models, the limitations also have significant implications that reach beyond the bounds of any single enterprise into the extended enterprises they are part of with their various collaboration partners.
In a more practical scenario, this problem could be easily represented by an unexpected equipment failure during the execution of a planned production order. It is clear that this is going to impact operations in the enterprise. However, that same impact is now propagating up and down the entire supply chain with potential financial implications including penalty costs and loss of business.
This document explains how three industry organizations, MIMOSA, the OPC Foundation, and the ISAs SP95 Committee are working together to provide the process industries the capability to openly and securely exchange O&M information.
