ISA-95 is an international standard that facilitates the integration of all information systems that may be involved in a manufacturing environment, from business functions to plant control systems.

This Standard contains standardised models and terminology that can be used by any entity that wants to work on the development of applications, systems and interfaces, to determine what information, and with what structure, should be exchanged between the different business functions (purchasing, sales, finance, logistics) and production management operations (production, inventories, maintenance and quality).

This information is structured in models represented in UML (Unified Modeling Language), which, historically, have been the basis for the development of standard interfaces between different information systems, such as ERP or MES, although nowadays it also helps industrial organisations to implement data integrations that link these MES and ERP with IIoT platforms or analysis solutions.

ISA-95 standard in Industry 4.0

Nowadays Industry 4.0 is experiencing has allowed the proliferation of solutions on the market that make it possible to digitise any type of industrial operation. Solutions that must not forget, as we have seen above, the ISA-95 Standard if they want to be competitive.

Production planning and control, format changes or changeover processes, maintenance, audits, quality checks, installations, etc., are managed more efficiently if they are governed by this standard, which determines the following levels:

- Level 0: the production process itself.
- Level 1: the devices that process and handle the product itself.
- Level 2: the devices that monitor and control the production process.
- Level 3: the devices that control the work flow and recipes of the production process and store all the information about it.
- Level 4: the level containing the logistics, inventory, ERP or planning infrastructure.