Over the years, advancements in control and enterprise technology have promised to give manufacturers the competitive edge they need to survive in a difficult economy. But applying technology without the context of standard processes and best practices can cause more harm than good, especially given the current circumstances manufacturers are up against: global competition, lean operations, and a whittled-down workforce. Without standards, manufacturers can spend the majority of their time trying to figure out how to use technology productively, rather than leveraging its inherent capabilities.
Nobody knows that better than Dennis Brandl, chief consultant at BR&L Consulting, who, over the past 20 years, has worked tirelessly, effectively, and voluntarily to define industry standards to help manufacturers become more productive.
Brandl has played central roles in two key standards: the ISA-88 standard for batch control and the evolving ISA-95 standard for integration between enterprise and control systems. Both have been developed under the aegis of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which is a part of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a network of national standards institutes across 157 countries. These groups are on a mission to help automation professionals deal with the rapid pace of change by applying standards to each process. For its part, ANSI enlists the help of ISA, a non-profit group that develops open automation standards.
With Brandl's considerable help, ISA-88 and ISA-95 are moving manufacturing forward in an organized manner and improving business. Indeed, when the ISA-88 batch standard has been applied, companies have seen a 30% improvement in productivity, Brandl says. And he should know, because he wrote the book on it.
In 2006, ISA published Brandl's Design Patterns for Flexible Manufacturing, which documents rules that should be used when applying the ISA-88 standard to batch manufacturing and continuous and discrete manufacturing problems. The book is based on the work Brandl did as chair of the ISA-88 committee, work that began, coincidently, in 1988.
Brandl was also an editor of the ISA-88 standard, a role that subsequently led to his appointment as editor of ISA-95 — again coincidently, in 1995. (Standards are numbered sequentially, not by year.)
For 20 years, in addition to raising four sons, working in a variety of roles at Sequencia Corp., Texas Instruments, Siemens, and Schneider Electric, and ultimately forming his own consulting company, Brandl has offered his services to help hammer out standards that will advance manufacturing. By guiding manufacturers in the best ways to deploy technology and processes, Brandl says, he is ensuring that "they won't have to go through the pain and inefficiencies that we've all had to go through."
Taking on the editorship of a multi-part standard is not trivial. The job is to collect all of the technical ideas and concepts and convert them into easy-to-understand English.
"It's a lot of listening to people to get at what they really mean," he says. Often, he has had to not only distill the information, but also mediate the meetings. "People will argue over words ... and they might be saying the same thing but using slightly different words ... I try to get at the underlying truth that everyone is trying to reach," Brandl says.
He has been in the middle of the fray and taken one for the team many times. "Dennis did a lot of the original writing and got the thinking down," says Charlie Gifford, chief manufacturing consultant at 21st Manufacturing Solutions, LLC, who, together with Brandl, is organizing the ISA's Industrial Interoperability Compliance Institute (IICI), an independent organization focused on compliance services for business-to-manufacturing systems integration as defined by ISA-95.