The Road to Integration: A Guide to Applying the ISA-95 Standards in Manufacturing, 2nd Edition

To run efficiently and cost effectively as well as produce quality products, manufacturing control systems on the plant floor must be able to communicate with the enterprise systems. Materials must be purchased and delivered on time, personnel must be scheduled, equipment must be available and operating properly, recipes must be precise, processes must be tracked, and product quality must be monitored so that changes can be made—all in real time. The problem is this: each system in the process speaks a different language.

The ISA-95 Enterprise Control System Integration series of standards is a guide for creating the interfaces needed to bridge the language gap. It provides consistent terminology for the phases and steps throughout the supply and manufacturing processes and models for implementing the interfaces. The Road to Integration, Second Edition, explains how to use the principles, terminology, and information methods in the standard to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and manufacturing operations management (MOM) systems. It provides examples and step-by-step plans for integration projects as well as case studies describing the implementation methods used by companies in different industries.

Specific topics include:

• Applying ISA-95 to determine a specific company's MOM/MES strategy
• Applying the ISA-95 object models
• Developing MES applications and databases
• Compiling user requirements
• Describing functional requirements
• Selecting vendors
• Analyzing and comparing capacities at different production sites
• Gaining insight into and optimizing production processes

The authors discuss ISA-95 in the broader context of modern information exchange technologies and offer a complete picture for project managers, consultants, programmers, and information architects who want to integrate ERP and MOM/MES systems based on the international standard.

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.
Dennis 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.