Managing Automation - March 2008 - (Page 38)

[MARCH 2008] Transformation Integration TechWatch Industries [ INTEGRATION ] Getting STANDARDS underONE roof BY STEPHANIE NEIL Standards organizations are cooperating under initiatives, such as OpenO&M, that allow for sharing information. Such efforts promise to ease application integration for manufacturers. arge ERP installations are not unusual these days. So, executives at Suncor Energy Inc., a major producer of oil, gas, and renewable energy sources, took it all in stride when they recently adopted an SAP system in-house. Install and all will be well. Or so they thought. The deployment was a success, but the company soon found out that simply running the enterprise application wasn’t enough. “We wound up with a humongous, greatly capable system that wasn’t connected to anything real,” says Cliff Pedersen, Suncor’s manager of product production processes. According to Pedersen, the company’s SAP system was fed by numbers from spreadsheets — which was great for figuring out financials, but not so wonderful when it came to measuring the actual production that generates the business’ bottom line. “Reality exists in the refiner y, or oil sands production facility, and in the natural gas facilities. That’s where the wealth is generated,” Pedersen says. And to measure that, he adds, you need to make connections with the process automation system. Making those connections is not easy. To date, most application integration has relied on proprietary point interfaces or middleware that multiplies over time, becoming expensive to build and maintain. Instead, Pedersen needed a standard way to inter face between Suncor’s Emerson Process Management DeltaV process control system and the new SAP ERP application. Otherwise, “you wind up with a bowl of spaghetti,” Pedersen says, referring to the multiple strings of programming code resulting from custom interfaces. What Pedersen and many of his peers want is one language that can be spoken between the plant floor and enterprise applications. The ISA automation standard-setting organization has been working to solve that problem, as has the Open Applications Group Inc. (OAGi). Meanwhile, on the plant floor, multiple groups, including MIMOSA, the World Batch For um (WBF), and the OPC Foundation, have been hammering out their own standards for data exchange around maintenance and operations assets; process operations; and data, alarm, and event management, respectively. While these groups have the best intentions — that is, to create a standard way to exchange data across the plant floor and into the enterprise — they have also created a competitive situation that defeats their purpose. “We don’t want to have competing standards” in the industrial automation space, says Tom Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. “It confuses companies, like SAP, [leaving them wondering] what they are supposed to do.” For that reason, the OPC Foundation, together with ISA and MIMOSA, banded together in 2003 to create the OpenO&M Initiative, a collaborative effort aimed at harmonizing information standards for the exchange of operations and maintenance data. This year, the work they’ve done in building a Web services framework and creating a crossreference registry of their related standards is finally being put to the test at major companies, ma March 38 2008 Illustration: Stefanie Timmermann

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - March 2008

Managing Automation - March 2008 Contents Take 1 Mailbox Mitsubishi, IBM, and ILS Team Up to Make Integration Easy for Automakers Former Agile Exec Takes the Reins at Arena Solutions The Next Phase for 2006’s PM Award Winner Integration Firm Boomi Redesigns for On-Demand Ex-Wonderware Chief Takes Helm at Apprion Notes Cover Story: A Rare Breed Special Report: Where are Control Architectures Heading? Transformation: Back to Reality Integration: Getting Standards Under One Roof Industries: The Quest for the Perfect Order Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - March 2008

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