MESA International opens membership to Smart Manufacturing Working Group

MESA International is opening its Smart Manufacturing Working Group to global manufacturers/producers and solution providers, effective immediately. Launched in 2014, the Working Group has established its charter, leadership structure and vision for deliverables and is actively engaging in several initiatives that fall under the broad heading of 'Smart Manufacturing'. Those activities are gaining momentum, and MESA is looking for more competent contributors to help steer and drive them.

The ultimate goal of the group is to demystify much of the technology-related information being thrown at businesses today, specifically as it pertains to manufacturing or production-related operations. The 'Industrial Internet of Things', 'Industry 4.0', the 'Model-Based Enterprise' and 'Smart Manufacturing' are just a few of the evolving terms and initiatives companies must interpret and translate into business value today. Such interpretation and translation require broad input and a non-commercial focus, as is provided by MESA International, which is why the Smart Manufacturing Working Group was launched. MESA President Mike Yost said of the group's goals, "Our members have little time to listen to hype and little appetite for promises of future glory. They simply and directly want to know where to find the business value in such investments. So, this group's efforts to cut through the jargon and define best practices and practical approaches are both timely and worthwhile for our members."

The MESA working group expects to help provide consistent messaging in smart manufacturing-related topics internally and externally, interacting with other industry organisations to drive common understanding for all. Such collaboration has already begun, as the MESA group will provide a positioning paper on the topic of Cloud Services for Smart Manufacturing to NIST for their work in this arena. Additional work for the MESA Smart Manufacturing Working Group includes:

• an overarching white paper explaining the different initiatives, terms and integration standards in industry and tying them to Smart Manufacturing;
• an expansion of MESA's 'Collaborative Manufacturing Dictionary' to include relevant definitions;
• a member survey on standards adoption;
• a library of 'Manufacturing Business Processes' or 'Use Cases' that map production processes across internal operating departments and supply chains.

Commenting on the work ahead of the group, Conrad Leiva, MESA's Smart Manufacturing Working Group chairman and VP, Product Strategy & Alliances at iBASEt, said, "Manufacturers, solutions providers and industry experts are talking about modernising manufacturing through IT with the expectation of great economic impact. But, smarter manufacturing won't happen without people exchanging ideas and collaborating across the operations, automation and information technology ranks. They're not simple discussions, but we're the right people to drive them, and we encourage others to join us."