ISA-95 “Vertical” and “Horizontal” Integration

ISA-95 is an international standard which has been used for 20 years; recent transformations in operations management and computing technology has caused some to question its importance.

ISA-95 has now become extremely important – it is necessary to understand what this standard does before we can understand its importance.  This standard is an “information exchange model” focused on “level 3” (operations management functions), with specifications for information exchanges between level 4 (enterprise software) and level 3, and level 3 to level 3.

Before 2010, many operations management implementations were relatively simple, using what the author calls “vertical” integration – the dominant pattern was exchanges between level 3 and level 4, such as the following example:

In recent years, more industrial facilities have adopted the use of operations management software, including many more software components, and more customer industries, such as petroleum refining, mining etc.  For many implementations, the dominant pattern is exchanges between level 3, such as the following example:

In the above diagram, several of these activities are often implemented with multiple applications, such as work management, electronic logbook, laboratory information management, material movement tracking, data reconciliation etc. – some implementations have more than 20 applications for a single site, with multiple sites (a few dozen in a large petroleum company, several hundred in a large food and beverage company).  Much of the information exchange is level 3 to level 3 or what the author calls “vertical” integration.

So, why has ISA-95 become very important now?  One of the main reasons is that information is exchanged 10-100 times more frequently, with 10-100 times more detail.  Materials have sub materials – even mining, petroleum refining and petrochemicals deal with molecules or groups of like molecules.  Lots have sub-lots; work has much greater detail.  Determining the suitability of a previously trusted software application (including the ubiquitous Excel files) for this information exchange becomes easier when assessed against this standard.