Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D) took a substantial step toward closing the gap between the shop floor and the top floor by recently announcing two new library templates that tap into industry standards to more closely align the company's SIMATIC IT MES product with ERP applications. Word of the two new libraries follows the formation of a new Siemens A&D organization whose mission is to extend SIMATIC IT beyond MES and into manufacturing intelligence as well as PLM, company officials told Managing Automation in an interview late last year. Siemens' two new Cross-Industry Libraries (CILs) comprise a generic version, dubbed CIL ERP, which can be used with almost any brand of ERP, and the CIL-E2S, which is for legacy SAP installations. CIL ERP connects SIMATIC IT directly to any ERP system that complies with the Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML), an XML implementation of the ISA-95 international standard. Using XML schemas, B2MML adds terminology outlined in ISA-95 to data models that are used to determine which information is to be exchanged between plant-floor and enterprise systems. Siemens' CILs standardize the synchronization of master data, resource availability, schedules, and production history, according to a statement issued by parent company Siemens AG. Siemens A&D officials were unavailable for comment at press time, but according to information on the company's corporate Web site, there are over two dozen CILs available for applications such as batch analysis, materials management, genealogy, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and RFID. The libraries consist of best-practice templates in the form of pre-configured graphical rules, reports, and user screens. Because CILs are composed only of graphical rules and open source user screens (with no custom code), they enable fast, efficient, low-risk projects with the lowest possible total cost of ownership, Siemens claims. The new, ERP-enabled CILs are said to integrate plant-floor systems with existing business systems without disrupting existing configurations or adding middleware. A company using mySAP ERP, for example, can leverage the ISA-95 application interface and connect with plant data via the SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) component of SAP NetWeaver. The CIL designed for legacy SAP applications addresses those installations that don't have dedicated middleware by coordinating between SIMATIC IT and SAP's IDOC (Intermediate Document), Remote Function Call (RFC), and Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI), according to a Siemens document. The goal of the new Siemens A&D organization -- called SIMATIC IT Business Unit -- is to integrate onto a single software architecture previously acquired technologies ranging from MES to LIMS. "This is in fact going on now," said Ralf Sonnefeld, SIMATIC IT business unit manager in an interview this past November. "For example, we are working on things like a 'unified view build paradigm' for all of SIMATIC IT. Normally you build applications in different ways ... [within the new framework] it will all look the same whether it's MES or the real-time intelligence dashboard." The design goal, Sonnefeld said, is to be able to plug in functions based on need. While there is no timeframe for the integration work to be completed, the business unit's new CILs are another step forward in Siemens' reinvigorated push to connect its MES software with the rest of the manufacturing enterprise.