ORLANDO, JANUARY 28, 2004 -- Leaders of OMAC Users Group and World Batch Forum (WBF) announced today at the annual ARC Forum their intention to explore cooperative activities that will lead to higher manufacturing productivity for their member companies. 

By leveraging the commonality between the organizations’ existing bodies of work, they see the potential to streamline manufacturing systems integration, training and manpower productivity by an order of magnitude.

WBF, through the ISA, and OMAC Users Group, through its Guidelines, have been working in parallel to define standardized models and naming conventions for batch and discrete processes.  The next step is for these user groups to leverage what they have in common and increase the commonality of language, content and structure across the total process value chain.

The initiative will kick off at WBF’s May 16-19, 2004 meeting in Chicago with a working session to coordinate development and implementation of ISA’s SP88 and SP95 standards with OMAC’s SP88-derived PackML™ state model and related Guidelines across continuous, batch and discrete processes.

Representing WBF, David Chappell, Technology Leader for Procter & Gamble, cites a convergence of automation technologies and standards:  “We believe that a consistent use of standards will allow different people within different operations at the same company to apply automation technologies in the same ways.  This will result in lower costs, common skills levels and reduced manpower requirements.

Thinus van Schoor, Automation Manager for SAB Miller and Executive Committee member of the OMAC Packaging Workgroup, asserts that most process companies also have a discrete side, as in packaging.  “In today’s manufacturing environment, the fundamentals of process, batch and discrete automation technologies have more in common than ever,” van Schoor explains.  “The increasing need for manufacturing agility demands that we cut across the different silos and departments, speak the same language and model processes in the same way.  If we can merge our process and discrete manufacturing operations, we will generate great efficiencies for our corporations.”

Chappell concurs: ”We are addressing the structural silos imposed by current thinking and technology, which support and propagate the cultural and artificial silos in companies.”  To do so, van Schoor advises, “The first step must be to focus on our similarities, not our differences.”

Interested manufacturing, automation and business leaders are invited to participate in the groups’ first working session at the WBF meeting May 16-19, 2004.  For more information about ongoing activities and future meetings, contact World Batch Forum at www.wbf.org.