Integration of business and production processes

The modem market demands individual products and short delivery times. Many companies redesign their administrative and Automation systems to enhance flexibility, and quick-response to market. This demands large-scale integration of business systems with production systems. The nature of these-two classes of systems is very different. Business systems are transaction based and, operate primarily on aggregated values in non-real time. Automation systems are real time based operating on single point values. The integration of the two types of systems implies they can be viewed as one large scaled distributed company control system where, often, the human acts as the controller. The innovative aspect is to combine the control related knowledge with the real, and always non-ideal, world. One result of this innovative view of a company is that the future demands to manufacturing companies very much consist of closing as many loops as possible without the necessity of a human being. The loops are not-traditional machine control loops but rather those that run the company by combining business and production processes. In these loops the human being should interchange the role of a direct controller with that of a right-to-intervention. The paper consists of two parts. Part one presents the theoretical foundation originating from The Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) standards: S88 - Batch Control [1], and SP95 - Enterprise-Control System Integration [2]. Part two reports from a period of employment of more than 6 years where the author was concerned with the IT and automation systems at the Danish Steel Works (DSW).