Food Safety Management Systems for the International Supply Chain

With more complex enterprises and supply chains that are described, we need to recognize that more complex data management systems are needed. The systems we invested in when the extended enterprise counted a few facilities are now inadequate to handle the tasks we have defined.

The greater number of participants in the supply chain substantially increases the complexity of coordination tasks. All the different components of supply chain need to be aligned and synchronized or the system will fail. How do we transfer data and control from supply chain segment to segment? How do we speak the same language throughout a diverse, multi-company system?

How to Do it?

Just as the scope and goals of the systems are defined by the ISO standards, we can use manufacturing data systems to provide us the roadmap and enabling techniques to get us there.

The ISA-95 (ISO/IEC-62264) standard developed by the ISA (Instruments, Systems and Automation Society), provides that roadmap for the integration of manufacturing systems with business systems. ISA maps all workflow, data interactions and the processes for data handling functions ranging from process data collection through to integrating the production data with financial and customer data for management processes and decision making.

The ISA-95 functional hierarchy model describes best practices integration of manufacturing and business sides of enterprise management. ISA-95 and B2MML (Business to Manufacturing Markup Language) provide the vehicle to enable universal systems across all languages and cultures involved in supply chain.

Charlie Gifford, director of lean production management, GE Fanuc Automation Inc. (Charlottesville, Va.), explains the problem. “Everyone likes to invent their own terms to describe work activities and the variables that are monitored,” he says. “We have to agree on terms to communicate. With ISA-95, we have broken the units of work into segments and all levels from plant to enterprise, define the work. Every segment is described in terms of people, equipment or materials.”

This process provides context and infrastructure and every data-related task from data capture, management, analysis and reporting is defined and mapped to the manufacturing data system. This advance work minimizes overhead, maximizes function and accuracy, enables SOP compliance and timeliness of action.

Production Activities

The ISA’s SP95 committee has defined activities and processes in great detail. This enables systems designers and implementers to drill down in their planning process. The diagram above drills down on level to reveal production activities. The segments in red indicate the sections that describe the analytical and reporting functions, enabling us to monitor and control safety and quality activities.

We will not go into the host of flow diagrams and definitions that are in the ISA-95 activity models. All of these operations, its components and interface to other activities have been thoroughly mapped and are available to use to optimize our chances for a successful systems implementation.

Since only about 30 percent of IT projects are judged complete successes, we want to use the ISA-95 standard to increase the likelihood of success. The goal from our perspective is to unify supply chain information systems to enable supply chain success.

Additional professional organizations have joined with ISA to converge their standards through the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group. The group develops an industry guideline that defines generic business process models between the operations management and business layers of the manufacturing support systems.

ISA-95 is gaining acceptance as the basis for planning large scale manufacturing enterprise management systems. For example, Dave Emerson, Yokogawa (Tokyo), at the 2005 World Batch Forum cited an ISA-95 enterprise system being developed for Nestle to integrate disparate systems for different divisions.

This system uses SAP for the large scale enterprise management software. It is critical to note that all major systems vendors including SAP are now underwriting ISA-95. ERP and business process management systems are not set up to aggregate and analyze manufacturing data. For these functions, they depend on manufacturing execution systems. By observing ISA-95 standards, they will be secure in their ability to request and receive the appropriate data and reporting.