Traditionally, the third day of the ARC Forum was given over to OMAC meetings. This year, there were actually a variety of sessions. Unfortunately, many people left after the Wednesday afternoon sessions. I sat in several sessions on security that were excellent. It included a couple of presentations on the status of standards--what NIST is doing and the ISA99 standard that is in process of adoption by IEC. Then two presentations on patch management including a presentation by P&G about how they are doing it. There were three concurrent sessions. I didn't go to one at all. After seeing some of the security presentations, I went over to the OMAC track on best practices in manufacturing. Some good stuff there, too. Talks on OEE and dashboards--that is gathering information and using it to improve manufacturing at a business level.
In the afternoon, OMAC held its sessions. After some presentations reporting on the November Forum at Boeing and on ideas for increasing and promoting membership (I'll have more details as they give it to me in an approved form for propagation), Executive Director Dave Baumann led a discussion on futures. It was a little quiet, so I succeeded in stirring the pot and lots of good discussion and ideas ensued.
The real problem, it seems to me, is that the packaging work group achieved a lot of success in morphing ISA 88 ideas over to packaging automation--PackML, PackTags, Connect and Pack, and so on--but now it's not sure exactly where to go. The machine tool work group has been diligently working away and achieving some successes. But there is a huge group of other machinery at best only partially covered by the work as Tracy Miller from John Deere and Rob Aleksa of P&G pointed out. Problem is, so much has been invested by the Pack group, that now there is the potential problem that they won't want to go beyond that. I believe that the next step for OMAC is to take the work that is done, find a way to still promote the names now well known in the packaging industry, but begin to apply the work more generally (as I believe the ISA SP88.05 committee is attempting). This will expand the membership and make the work more important to manufacturing as a whole.
ISA has a similar problem as it attempts to grow with the times and broaden its appeal. It's important for organizations to recognize and reward the incumbents who built the organization while bringing in new ideas and people to maintain or reinvigorate momentum.
By the way, another sign of the need to grow--the numbers of people at the OMAC meetings seemed to be less than often in the past. Time for a jump start.
8:32:40 AM 
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