Bottom-line Thinking

该问题的主要重点是“绿色”，既关注环境问题和企业盈利能力。第二个重要问题是在开发机器中扮演的角色标准，这些机器使制造能够响应客户需求和公司竞争力。当然，共同点是自动化和卓越运营的编织。

有些人听到绿色这个词时会感到政治振动。对于某些人来说，振动是积极的，而对于其他人来说，它更类似于几伏的60周期动力，向上伸出手臂。忘记政治。绿色有很多价值观。许多经理重视是其城市中的好企业公民，并试图运营不会引起不高度宣传的设施。在本期涵盖的各种制造公司中，每个人都追求节能和绿色项目的原因有所不同，但在每种情况下，这都是良好的商业意义。您可以是保守的，有利可图的和绿色的 - 同时。

Standards

Procter＆Gamble Co.公司工程人员的一个小组邀请我走上有关他们如何使用标准作为机器规格的一部分的讨论。您可以从第48页开​​始阅读面试。

It’s important not to miss the fact that P&G does not invest the people resources required to develop and promote standards out of some altruistic sense that standards are good. It invests because it makes business sense. Machines that operate in standard ways make it easier to train operators. The operators will be more efficient because the similar behavior of machine controls causes less confusion as they move from machine to machine. Because standards define many operations, machines can be designed, built and installed more quickly. This gets production started sooner.

Some people have voiced the concern that standards hamper innovation. If you fall into that camp, read what the P&G engineers have to say. Following standards for control systems eliminates some of the duplication of effort at the design stage and allows machine builders time to emphasize innovation in the process. In fact, control standards do not eliminate the possibility that the designer could devise proprietary and innovative algorithms in the code. They could just embed them in a function block that contains, for example, compiled C code. No one would care, as long as the execution and interface remained standard.

There are two streams to the standards that the P&G engineers were discussing—ISA88 and OMAC’s PackML. The ISA88 standard, developed by a committee of the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society, defines terms, interfaces and a state model for batch control. Other engineers looked at the standard and thought, “I bet that model would work for machines and other processes, too.” They were right. A group of end-user and technology supplier engineers began meeting under the auspices of the Open Modular Architecture Control Users Group (OMAC) and formed a packaging working group. This group devised an implementation of the ISA88 state model that described packaging machines. They called it PackML. The same group also worked on definition of terms used in control, called PackTags. These ideas are being slowly implemented.

OMAC is now at a crossroads. It can coast along with its success with packaging. Or, on the other hand, it can build on this success and make the standard relevant to all machines. There is some work in that direction in the ISA88 Part 5 committee (ISA88.05), which is also called Make2Pack. I hope that the current leadership can find a way to get the membership excited again and extend their work.

Gary Mintchell, Editor in Chief,gmintchell@automationworld.com