Author Q&A: The Road to Integration, Second Edition

Please provide a brief description of your book.
This book defines the industry best practices for integrating manufacturing systems into business systems, taking the journey from analysis to implementation. It specifies how to use the ANSI/ISA 95 Enterprise/Control system standards as a roadmap for understanding integration requirements. It also covers the preparation and methodology for analysis, interviewing guidance, and a step-by-step integration project plan. User stories from actual integration projects are included to aid in understanding the issues in integration projects and solutions provided by the ISA95 standard. We discuss the latest versions of ISA95 and include detailed examples of all object models, message transactions, message service models, and master data profiles. This book provides both a tutorial on the latest ISA-95 set of standards and a list of pitfalls to avoid when performing an integration analysis based on the standards.

Who is this book written for?
The primary audience for this book includes automation engineers, business analysts, and manufacturing consultants. This book is also well suited for automation managers and integration project leaders.

What changes to the ISA95 standard prompted you to write this second edition?
The ISA95 committee has added significant new elements since this book was originally published, including the information model used for horizontal integration across manufacturing operations, profiles, and standards for message exchanges. Combined, all of these new elements provide a complete set of standards that can be used in any manufacturing enterprise to increase its productivity and manufacturing quality.

What are some of the ways your book differs from others written on the subject?
This book was written specifically for those needing to make sense of the multiple different integration points that are required to realize the digital transformation that occurs as real-time systems are integrated with business systems. It also provides an in-depth tutorial on how to use these widely accepted standards in real projects.

Could you briefly refer to, or state, specific sections of the book that have either been added, expanded, or improved?
The sections on the ISA95 models have been significantly expanded and updated with the new models in the latest releases of the ISA95 parts. ISA95 Part 6, Messaging Service Model; Part 7, Alias Service Model; and TR01, Master Data Profile Template, have been added.

Bianca Scholten is a manufacturing IT architect at ASML, an innovation leader in the semiconductor industry. Over the past 20 years, she has been a consultant advising multinationals on defining and realizing their manufacturing IT strategies.

Ms. Scholten is the author of the book MES Guide for Executives: Why and How to Select, Implement and Maintain a Manufacturing Execution System, for which she received the Thomas G. Fisher award (best new standards-based ISA book of 2009) and the Raymond D. Molloy award (best-selling ISA book of 2009). Two years earlier, she won the 2007 versions of these same awards for The Road to Integration. In 2008, she received the ISA Standards and Practices Award for her outstanding contribution to the technical report Using ISA88 and ISA95 Together.

Ms. Scholten was a voting member of the ISA95 committee and has published many papers on vertical integration and technical automation in trade journals. She has also trained hundreds of professionals in applying the ISA-88 and ISA-95 standards.

In addition to her technical experience, Ms. Scholten has a master’s degree in art history.

In 2022, Ms SCholten and Dennis Brandl released the second edition of The Road to Integration.

Dennis Brandl is the founder and chief consultant for BR&L Consulting, which special­izes in helping companies use manufac­turing IT to improve their production and logistics processes. He has been involved in business-to-manufacturing inte­gration, automation cybersecurity, MES, and batch system design and implementation in a wide range of applications, including biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical plants and oil refineries, food manufacturing, con­sumer packaged goods, and aerospace systems.

Brandl has written numerous papers and articles on business-to-manufacturing inte­gration and flexible manufacturing solutions, has a regular column on manufac­turing IT issues in Control Engineering, authored the book Design Patterns for Flexible Manufacturing, and co-authored the book Plant IT, Integrating Information Technology into Automated Manufacturing. Brandl is an active member of the ISA95 Enterprise/Control System Integration committee, is coauthor of the MESA B2MML standards, is a mem­ber of the ISA99 Industrial Cybersecurity standards committee, is the former chair of the ISA88 Batch System control committee, and has participated in the development of OPC and other industrial standards.

In 2013, Brandl was inducted into Control magazine’s Process Automation Hall of Fame, and in 2008 he was listed as one of the leading thinkers in manufactur­ing technology by Managing Automation magazine. He has a BS in physics, an MS in measurement and control from Carnegie-Mellon University, and an MS in computer science from California State University.