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Last week I attended a local ISA section meeting focused on batch manufacturing automation. Happily, the presenters were both process engineers at complex batch process plants in the area. A couple of my colleagues at ARC are now finishing up an update to ARC's Market Outlook report on batch. The process engineers talked about their work, about automation systems, the level of integration with production planning and maintenance, about their corporate automation strategies, and about how they support their operations and systems. I took away three things from listening to them: First, the level of integration between batch systems and enterprise applications still varies all over the map, as always. There may be a great deal of value achieved by integrating batch with production planning, ERP, and EAM, but you will not find this integration everywhere you look. In fact, you may find none of it. Second, reusable application engineering is extremely important for batch automation, because it's not just the engineering savings that are realized. Having a fully consistent manufacturing process across many units and plants is critical for producing consistent quality products. In pharmaceutical industry applications that manufacturing process may require regulatory validation. In food, beverage, and CPG applications it is one key to achieving consistent product quality. In order to achieve this, application engineering that is captured in product recipes, etc. needs to be directly portable across the available production assets. 
The companies represented at the ISA meeting both had the same strategy for achieving this: they used the same automation supplier. ANSI/ISA-88 “compliance” does not extend as far as achieving cross-vendor portability, so the only way these manufacturers could achieve their desired level of portability was to use the same batch automation system throughout their plants. They (obviously) were not happy about this, but it was very much the reality they faced. Third, system support is another area of wide variance. The available human resources are the process engineers themselves, their IT colleagues, and automation system vendor support. But internal IT participation may be limited by the challenges of the IT/OT organizational relationship. The more functional this relationship, the greater leverage can be achieved from IT. This is especially helpful as virtualization penetrates further into the batch systems. Vendor support sources can include the automation supplier, the supplier’s channel partners, as well as engineering consultants who may have engineered part or all of the plant. Over time, system issues will arise that require expertise from each of these. I walked away from this meeting with renewed appreciation for the challenges of managing production in plants like this, and grateful for the dedication shown by the engineers meeting these challenges every day.
The companies represented at the ISA meeting both had the same strategy for achieving this: they used the same automation supplier. ANSI/ISA-88 “compliance” does not extend as far as achieving cross-vendor portability, so the only way these manufacturers could achieve their desired level of portability was to use the same batch automation system throughout their plants. They (obviously) were not happy about this, but it was very much the reality they faced. Third, system support is another area of wide variance. The available human resources are the process engineers themselves, their IT colleagues, and automation system vendor support. But internal IT participation may be limited by the challenges of the IT/OT organizational relationship. The more functional this relationship, the greater leverage can be achieved from IT. This is especially helpful as virtualization penetrates further into the batch systems. Vendor support sources can include the automation supplier, the supplier’s channel partners, as well as engineering consultants who may have engineered part or all of the plant. Over time, system issues will arise that require expertise from each of these. I walked away from this meeting with renewed appreciation for the challenges of managing production in plants like this, and grateful for the dedication shown by the engineers meeting these challenges every day.