Who We Are

April 2007

Beeond President and CEO Costantino Pipero has co-authored the newly released ISA Guide entitled "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Manufacturing Operations Management: ISA-95Best Practices Book 1.0." More on the book at   Amazon.com

About ISA
Founded in 1945, ISA (www.isa.org) is a leading,global, nonprofit organization that is setting the standard for automation by helping over 30,000 worldwide members and other professionals solve difficult technical problems, while enhancing their leadership and personal career capabilities. Based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, ISA develops standards; certifies industry professionals; provides education and training; publishes books andtechnical articles; and hosts the largest conference and exhibition for automation professionals in the Western Hemisphere. ISA is the founding sponsor of The Automation Federation (www.automationfederation.org). 

• May 3, 2007 - World Batch Forum2007 - Beeond President and CEO Costantino Pipero willpresented his White Paper entitled "SustainableBusiness Process Management with BPMN, XAML and B2MML".

• March 6, 2006 World Batch Forum2006 - Beeond President and CEO Costantino Pipero and Kishen Manjunath, Honeywell Process Solutions presented a White Paper  entitled "ISA S95 Implementation Best Practices Workflow Descriptions using B2MML".

Engineering consulting is in all an interesting trade. I have been deserting my blog due to a never-checking deadline, which I am sure most of you can sympathize with.

Basically, imagine you’re a cleaning solutions consultant visiting a customer who has the following requirements:“Well, see my 8X12 living room is carpeted wall to wall and there’s some furniture on the way. I need to vacuum it at least once a week because I have two cats, you know… Usually every now and then I rent a carpet cleanerto wash it. I am pretty satisfied but my vacuum cleaner is quite old, out of warranty, and the cable has worn out. So I’m looking for a replacement”.

You take notes, go back to your office, and after 6 weeks you go back with you proposed solutions specifications.

So you get to the customer offering a shiny John Deere 2000 Series, 26.5 HP engine, simple to drive and very versatile. It mounts a Centrifugal Pump, Suction/Discharge NPT Size 1 1/2 Inches, Speed 1750 RPM, which connect to a flexible pipe that runs through the left armrest for comfort. And, with full advance payment, you can accommodate a small high pressure water tank in the back with relative hose that can be used for washing cycle or, even better, just to move furniture without having to leave the vehicle.

Now, it is true that you are meeting the customer’s requirements. My take, however, is that you are not likely to land the sale.

Of course, if I had a nickel for every time someone said that communication is the major driver of any project, I’d be wealthy enough to actually clean my living room with a tractor.

And maybe the customer shouldn’t have gone to a John Deere rep to look for an answer.

So, you want to clean your room before building you Christmas Tree? Here’s a couple of hints.

You have to do your homework and baseline the communication: take a look for example at the TOGAF methodology. It is a framework that addresses the organization of the information and tasks in reference to the definition of and enterprise level systems architecture.

It traces a sequence of steps that are adaptable to the complexity of the solution and that rotate around the main activity of managing requirements. One of the only constraints is that every activity needs to define inputs and outputs (do you remember UML?), which help you analayze and streamline what you really need, what can be reused to satisfy more than one requirement, etc.

But most of everything, how decisions are communicated among the project stakeholders. It’s really woth some attention as it ties well into other models such as the ISA 95 and ISA 88 views of all things production.

I am actually busy trying to find those touch points for sake of consistency and for future janitorial endeavors.

Stay tuned.

London Heathrow, Terminal 4, on my way back home one nice September afternoon. On my 2 hours layover I wander around the terminal, looking for some time to kill. It’s a Saturday, and I don’t feel like pulling out the laptop after a busy week. I need some coffee.

As I pass the Currency Exchange kiosks I glance at a familiar sign, and the unmistakable branded scent veers me towards the girl at the counter. Starbucks Coffee. “Doppio Espresso, please”, I like to say that, because I have to fake the way English speakers pronounce these words; if I say it the “proper” way (my native language is Italian), most of the times they don’t understand me.

But that’s the point. I could have gone to a Costa Coffee (all over the British airports) or other java powered outfits. The reason why I always go for the green “Starbucks” sign is for the very same reason they made themselves such a success: those two words “Doppio Espresso” will give me almost exactly the very same thing no matter where in the world I am.

This is the power of the standardization. Of course, you wouldn’t find any of those green signs in Italy like you don’t find Pizza Hut or Dean Martin’s CDs… but at least you would still drive your car on the right lane.

Those who travel frequently will recognize themselves being in the habit of sticking to widely available brands, products, hotel chains, wireless providers, etc. It is just so convenient and limits the risks, improves the decision time and most important, often does not require translation (everybody can say “Coca Cola”).

This proves the need for my job: the standardization of systems and processes in an organization.

I spent the week meeting Jean Vieille in Paris and Bianca Scholten in Belgium for our common activities in the ISA 95 interoperability standard. The progress made in the last couple of years for the adoption of this standard is quite impressive.

This made me think about the Swiss Army Knife : I imagined at some point a Swiss soldier - patrolling the beautiful Alps looking for a war he wouldn’t join - pulling out a pocket blade to start carving a pipe out of a dried tree branch. Of course, Swiss people are usually quite inventive and industrious, so I pictured our young fellow struggling to carve a round and deep hole in the center of the wood piece. A nail or more pointy tool would do, hmmm, how about a corkscrew! To seal the joints with some spare leather he starts chewing on the tip of his belt: “what a treat if I had my scissors…”.

The Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) has reached its forth major release, which now includes the transactions as per the ISA 95 Part 5 specifications. The Web Service Definition Language ISA 95 working group [link to codeplex.com ] started working on the actual implementation of those transactions.

To quote Keith Unger [link here] as he often comments in the committee meetings, “in order to build this room people used more than one standard”. We are at a point where in order to achieve interoperability and harmonization of enterprise systems we need more that one blade.

To that, I would like to point out the joint efforts made by the Open O&M standard consortium to release a multi-purpose collaboration solution for manufacturing and maintenance management systems. I am part of another working group that will be looking at the touchpoints between ISA 95 and SCOR.

With SAP playing a big role in the standard value proposition, we cannot forget our meetings in Redmond last June where Microsoft showed interest and commitment in ISA 95. Plus, the usual suspects (ABB, Invensys, Rockwell, Siemens, IBM, and others).

It’s really worth to stay tuned to follow this new trends that drive the market and the consensus in the world of manufacturing intelligence, not only for ISA 95/B2MML but to all those efforts to baseline the communications in such a diverse offering in terms of solutions, platforms and best practices.

“Is that for here or to go?”, as they say at Starbucks. Mind you, the double shot in UK costs about 4 bucks…

In my four years in Southern California, my friends and colleagues managed to talk me into trying surfing in the effort to facilitate a more seamless integration to a new country.
I remember going to a shop in Huntington Beach to get a wetsuit and some floating gear to get in the proper mind set for this challenge. The drill was to show up at San Onofre around 5:30 in the morning facing a freezing ocean on a bodysurf device so as to become more comfortable with the challenging rough waters.Needless to say, any attempt to get any significance out of such exercise would have been washed out in countless sub-water-washing-machine-tumbling maneuvers.

First, you have to “catch the wave”, which means you have to look afar as they rise and try to predict whether the one coming is the the right one. Everyone gets excited, so you think this is it. As it approaches, you realize that your long expected wave riding is more like the liquid version of the wrath of Neptune: you cannot escape it as its current sucks you right into it, and - more sadly – you definitely cannot ride that.Other times, as your tongue still swells by the overdose of saline injections, fewer mellow rips come along while you are paddling to overcome the chill. Ten, twenty minutes of pure boredom.

“You have to wait for the second waves”, which I think are the ones generated by the back stream of a tide. Sometimes they come, but by then I’d managed to safely re-conquer the land that my ancestors first found. Other times, you are entertained through conversation with a blonde “dude” that tries to convince you that it is possible to breathe under water (I guess he tried to light up sea-weed while he was there too).

But then again, I was the pale shadow of any “Big Kahuna” out there. So I reset my alarm clock to more earthling hours.

Recently, I've heard a number of times discussions about a “second wave” of our beloved Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). I guess the signs are out there to indicate a rising demand of new solutions to address the shortcomings of more traditional process controls on one side, and rigid enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) on the other.

It is not a coincidence, that such “new wave” discussions have something to do with the success of the newest integration standards such as ISA 95, ISA 88, OAGIS, and the like.

But such enthusiasm does not come without concerns (more or less like the waves out there in the ocean).First, people started modeling MES and Data Collection directly from the ISA 95 object models. This has two major effects: a) they are not database design specifications; as a matter of fact, if they were we definitely will not find employment as database developers; b) the users still call it a “route operation”, not a “SegmentRequirement”; so much for ease of use.

Second, the standards are made mainly to drive consensus (and in that we definitely succeeded), to change as often as possible to answer the broadest requirements. Hence, tying these into products actually counteracts the main purpose of the standards.

So I guess the “second wave” of MES is really the realization that premature efforts of unrequested compliance were a weak attempt. The “new wavers” now come packed with functionalities (like workflow modeling, KPI compositions, and business rules configuration) that address the very requirements categorized through the standards, to interpret those models instead of implementing them directly.

A great reading for all on this topic is Bianca Scholten’s “A Road to Integration”: The book explores the ISA 95 specifications as a means to gather, analyze, and measure the users’ requirements for integration. After establishing a good foundation, in the first half of the book, it then clearly and concisely dives into the details of implementation, clearly illustrating the B2MML schemas (the only open implementation of ISA 95 based interoperability) which are mean to communicate, not necessarily to persist, the information traveling across production systems.

In light of all this, it comes to mind something my better skilled and daring paddling companion would say on a flat tided morning waiting for his dose of foam: “Second wave? You gotta be kidding me: you wouldn’t believe that THAT first one was actually a wave, would you?”.

During the works at the ISA Expo 2007 in Houston I made time to stop by the ISA booth and browse some of the more recent publications (including, of course, the one I coauthored – no harm in pride, true?) to try to stay abreast of trends and interests in the industry.

The fligth from Houston to Baltimore was a good chance to take a look at one of the finest writings in the automation universe, kindly signed by its author Dennis Brandl as we were walking around trying to snatch some free tickets for the Siemens’ Oktoberfest party at the Reliant Stadium.

Now, before I start praising the usefulness of such reading, let me remind Dennis Brandl and Charlie Gifford that they still owe me their copies of the in-promptu caricatures we all took at the party agreeing we would have published them on the Web for public entertainment.

So, for all things manufacturing most of us have been “touched” by the words S88 or ISA 88; and for those of us who are more IT versed, the term Design Patterns have been long digested and became part of our daily vocabulary.

Hance, the natural correlation of modeling abstraction and practical equipment utilization comes to life in the outstanding work of Brandl’s “Design Patterns fo Flexible Manufacturing”, ISA 2007.

This book is a very easy reading (only about 200 pages) that starts with a brief introduction on the different categories of manufacturing control, shading some light on the common concern that ISA 88 was a sole concern of batch processing systems. In truth, Brandl writes, the same behaviors equally apply to discrete and continuous (with all the variances) industries.

Design Patterns in such sense are not the software UML sillogisms we’re used in software development, but they are more of a pragmatic approach to the modeling of equipment functions and processes definition in a production management and control system.

Finally we learn abour the differences among Master, General, and Control recipes and the fact the things are not as rigid as we first thought by looking at the ISA 88 specifications. And it’s not just about machines, people and control logic: it’s more about the processes themselves. Business processes, that is.

I found points of paricular interest, and others that were less clear to me (my bad). So I went ahead and entertained a small discussion with the author. Here a summary of his answers, in hope to be of some further use for those who will read this book:

[COS] “There’s an interesting point on section 4.1 (page 46 and following) about recipes “collapsing” and expanding. Can you make an example of recipe execution systems (softwares or DCSs) that implement that behavior.”

[DENNIS] “I know that Siemens Batch has methods in place to collapse a recipe. They can generate a recipe with just phases. The OpenBatch based systems (RCBatch, IBatch, etc..) don’t support the collapsing and expanding. Other may, I don’t know.”

[COS]” On page 101, on the table 5-3, I really cannot understand the difference between SD(Stored and Time-Delayed) actions and DS ( Delayed and Stored) ones.”

[DENNIS] “I don’t really know the difference. I couldn’t find any definition in the 61131-3 standard. Its probably defined in a Siemens or Rockwell manual someplace. I think it is: in SD the output is turned on even when the SFC step is exited and then switched off once the timer has expired, while the DS delays for the timer value, then exits the SFC step but leaves the output turned on…”

[COS] “Finally, at 5.6 (page 119 onwards) when you talk about Material Transfers, specifically the matter of Header Transfer: how would you put the sharing of equipment modules (unallocated) in perspective of adherence to the ISA 88 standards? Do you conform to it, or do you amend it?”

[DENNIS] “The ISA 88 allows unallocated shared equipment modules, or at least they were discussed in the meeting. They are not visible to the recipe and are only there as a programming construct. ISA 88 Part 1 was very weak in the programming constructs. Maybe something like this will make it into the ISA 88 Part 5 work.”

Needless to say, we’d need more of such enlightnements in the crowded streets of industry standards. I think those explanation serve as a great baseline in the constant conversation between technology providers and end users, too often blurred by daring interpretations.