Does Master Data Management does it Apply in Industry

 This again most automation engineers and plant personal look at me with a "blank look". But those in the business side / IT understand the need and challenge. But the real question does this have a chance to really work in the operations level 3 space, let's have discussion around this.

As Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration put it in his paper"When last did you revisit your MOM?"

"Master Data Management (MDM)

The third proof of this conservative thinking is that very few manufacturing technologists have ever heard of Master Data Management (or MDM) and fewer understand what this actually mean. Enterprise solutions have long relied on MDM systems to ensure naming consistency and data translation between disparate enterprise-level solutions. Manufacturing has not even given this a thought as can be seen by the proliferation of point-to-point interfaces between systems."

Around the 2000 time, I like many of the MES linked people were looking at how to integrate to ERP systems through EAI etc, and we found ourselves on many inter- operative meetings. Discussing how bring S95 to reality, how can lower the risk, and engineering in this interoperability. Now 10 years on the EAI approach has worked for some companies, but as one of them said to me that 10% of the challenge and inter operative communication, synching is between the ERP and MES/ Operations. Actually 90% is at the ISA level 3 and it is as another company put" the invisible barrier, limitation to achieving industrial agility".

 

So what are we referring to is that there are so many applications in the operations areas which will come from different vendors or the different applications are focused on their area that their model approach is so very different. Yet for agility these different operational applications need to stay current and aligned, today this is ver manual alignment or custom code. Example I had one customer talk about DCS to Historian, and MES they make 16000 changes in their DCS systems every 6 months, and how do they make sure the configuration changes align across these 3 systems. Example if you have these three system modeling the same tank, one system generation alarms, one history, and the other batch, the size of the tank is key to all three. Now the plant is changed and the tank capacity is increased now one system is changed eg DCS but the others are not because they do fall under responsibility of the plant engineer. There is no system to say that there at least systems that depend on this master data, so many companies would start up totally unaware of the possible dangers. One company commented they find 80% of their miss alignment after start up.

This is where the opportunity for "master data management" comes to the front in industrial systems.

But some people state that we need to do is put all master data in one DB and every system access this, I would challenge this is not the correct path. It would lead to duplication of data, and performance and sustainability night mares.

The manufacturing data management needs to be a reference capability that allows the core data and models to stay in the original systems, and awareness of updates that are needed.

You should be asking yourself how can you do SOA and the service bus approach without this “industrial master data management" capability, especially when it goes outside the known data models and you use the SOA to federate external applications with their own data models.

Yes it is needed, I have seen at least 8 projects where different custom systems are being built. But all of these are custom, and really just links, and have little chance of being sustainable.

I hope I have opened food for thought.

Now that I have started the thought process we can expand next week, expand on my views and Gerhard's  how this applied in Industry, as the industrial market needs to open up to looking at tools to manage this.