Manufacturing Interoperability Standards Customer Advisory Council (IOpCAC)

Charter
Background
Goal
Strategy
Organization

Charter

The Manufacturing IOP Standards Customer Advisory Council (IOpCAC) represents major manufacturing organizations from process, discrete and hybrid manufacturing industries. The objective of the group is to reduce cost and time required to integrate and deploy plant to business (P2B) information technology systems for generic business processes.  IOpCAC Overview - June 2006

The group works to develop generic business process models and encourage development of reusable integration software components for processes between the operations management and business layers of the manufacturing support system.  

These software components will be identified based upon demonstrated market need.  Software components are to be developed in an open standard XML format to support a services oriented architecture.

The CAC is sponsored under a joint agreement between ISA and standards advisory groups (WBF, OAGi, MIMOSA and the OPC Foundation).   The CAC will be supported through an agreement with the ARC Advisory Group to ensure a balance of manufacturing industry interest between discrete, process and hybrid companies.

The CAC provides critical input to the efforts of the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group.

Background 

On December 8, 2005 the OAGi and ISA-SP95 announced intent to converge the OAGIS and S95 standards. This agreement will avoid duplication of efforts among the standards groups and lead to development of a common methodology for deployment.

Broad based support is needed among manufacturing customer organizations to support standards development and deployment activities. 

Customer guidance and support is needed for the standards organizations and software suppliers. The success of this effort and future development of standards based software components is dependent upon demonstrating a strong market need and customer commitment.

The ARC Advisory Group is assisting customer organizations with discussion of this topic.

Goal

The group goal is to collaborate and agree upon a prioritized list of business processes (scenarios) to be supported through convergence of the OAGIS, ISA-SP95 and other appropriate standards.  These business processes will be documented as simple abstract interface data flows and prioritized by the group to provide guidance and support to the standards bodies and software suppliers.

Strategy

The participating manufacturing organizations will meet under the umbrella of the ISA standards initiative to identify the collective needs for standards based IOP software components.  These needs will be expressed as a set of simple process scenarios between the business and operations management system layers.

The group will identify industry specific needs and business scenarios with areas of overlap across industries. 

The group will identify the underlying technologies to support deployment of standards based software components as Web Services. 

The group will explore IOP standards and software deployment strategies to ensure a viable and unified market opportunity is available to the software suppliers. 

Recommendations will be submitted to major software suppliers and the standards bodies for comment. Upon receipt of comments an updated business process scenario list will be published as guidelines for the software suppliers and standards bodies.

Organization

Participant is the CAC is open to major manufacturing organizations worldwide with an interest in contributing to the advancement of information technology standards supporting manufacturing operations from the shop floor to the business systems.  Standards efforts include recommendations for improved interoperability between the shop floor distributed manufacturing systems through the operations management systems and into the corporate IT business systems.

The CAC will select three board members to be appointed for three year terms with a new board member assigned annually in rotation.  This includes a Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary. 

Information and correspondence to the committee submitted through the ISA support web site for the council.