NIST & end users must bring STEP & OPEN O&M together

Aug. 28, 2008
Hello All. Sorry for long gap. Today I want to discuss ISO 10303, the standard for the exchange of product (STEP) model data, and how ISO and the OPEN Operations and Maintenance (Open O&M) are not working together, but must do so. Here is the situation that I see, knowing that I only have a spectator's view. ISO 10303 has been used in the product design organizations for discrete manufacturing for 15 years (A&D, automotive, industrial equipement, plant building design, some electronics). The st...
Hello All. Sorry for long gap. Today I want to discuss ISO 10303, the standard for the exchange of product (STEP) model data, and how ISO and the OPEN Operations and Maintenance (Open O&M) are not working together, but must do so. Here is the situation that I see, knowing that I only have a spectator's view. ISO 10303 has been used in the product design organizations for discrete manufacturing for 15 years (A&D, automotive, industrial equipement, plant building design, some electronics). The standard set and the assoicated software products has evolved right up to the manufacturing operations walls, but stopped there because the majority of the discrete manufacturing operations is done manually or through robotics or assembly lines. The actual production operations systems are primiarly paper-based routing and quality data collections. Most routes and work descriptions for the plant are product-centric. Meanwhile, the Open O&M standards (ISA-88, ISA-95, OMAC, OPC, OAGIS, MIMOSA) are primiarly operations-based where they design and characterize the product-non-specific definition of operations work and resources. The Open O&M standards view operations in recipes and routings as product-independant. They view that as the best way to address adaptive manufacturing. The Open O&M standards have matured to a point of application across all the batch and process industries (CPG, F&B, P&P, Pharm, Chemical, 3Ms, O&G). The software and hardware vendors for these industries are all moving their product towards the Open O&M baseline. Why? The manufacturers view this standardization as the best way to apply Lean as these industries move for a make-to-stock to a make-to-order manufacturing form. Meanwhile, the discrete industries and the ISO group are developing their own operations set of models to extend the design schema into operations. I believe that they are viewing that Lean single piece flow requires operations to be product-specific. I believe this is a very bad assumption. Production capability has to be charactized and optimized independently, and product production has to apply the limited resources based on availability. Currently, two large automotive manufacturers, GM and Tata Motors, have noticed this and determined that the best way to define the Lean standard work in the plant and baseline capabilities is to apply the OPEN O&M standards at their plants. This requires a transformation of the STEP-based designs and the PLM system into the manufacturing operations systems' data and process models. I believe that discrete and batch/process manufacturers and the vendors need to directly address NIST at a government level and ISO, ISA and OAG at an association level to get these standards groups to finally work together. The largest issue in the OPEN O&M is that the devekioers are volunteer and not supported at the committee level with money and resources by the manufacturers ,where the ISO 10303 group are heavily financed by discrete manufacturers and vendors. Siemens is in a position of direct leadership and needs to take this on, since they acquired UGS, which supports 10303 and owns/sells a large suite of OPEN O&M operations management products. I am personally working on a project where this situation creates mass confusion for manufacturers. One of my clients has 4 product lines funneling into one plant where, for the exact same production routing, the definitions for BOMs (engineering and manufacturing), routes, operations, work instructions, equipment settings are all different and product-specific. This means that the production controller, supervisor and operators have to deal with four different definitions for the same operations. This is a large barrier to Lean, standard work and single-piece flow. You simply cannot scale or flex the workforce or the production areas.