Manufacturing Language: How to Avoid a Tower of Babel?

Communication with clients can be difficult, IT engineers are known for having difficulty in speaking the everyday language. In college our professors teach us the business aspect of IT and try to show us how to speak to the customer. This is a skill that needs to be built through experience and some of us do better than others. Let’s call this new phenomenon “The IT language barrier”. Now, it seems to me that the manufacturing world has introduced a new variant: the manufacturing language barrier.

Even though the International Society of Automation (ISA) developed the ISA-95 standard 20 years ago, companies still speak different manufacturing languages according to their field of activity or to the software they have been using. From one firm to another, or from one desk to another within the same firm, one item can be referred to by different names. For example a “Serial Number” can also be called a “Barcode” or “Lot” according to who you are talking to. Plus, the same word can have different meanings when talking to different people. I remember talking to a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software trainer about “Serial Number”. It took me quite a while to realize that what he was referring to was what I would have called “Material” in my MES (Manufacturing Execution System) jargon, or “Material Definition”, or “Part Number”…

Problems can arise when using different terminologies at the beginning of a new project. This will slow down the conversation and add confusion and misunderstanding. In the worst case, it can drive a project in a wrong direction, putting it in jeopardy, especially when a basic language barrier is added to the technical language barrier.

I am quite sensitive to this particular topic since I am not a native English speaker. In a recent MES project with a European automotive company, building a brand new manufacturing site in North America, we flew to the customer’s plant after a few months of development for a first demonstration. As we were going through some presentations and discussions about the next phases of the project, we realized that a significant part of the process had been mis-designed. In my opinion, here are some of the reasons:

• absence of a current production line at requirement gathering time (the line helps the consultant to understand a client’s process),
• constant updating of their new process by the customer (also due to the fact that the new line had not been created yet),
• manufacturing language barrier,
• basic language barrier.

We had to go down to the freshly built production line and view the process to correct the solution’s design. It cost the project a few days and the development team a few hours of sleep to solve this miscommunication issue.

Obviously this case is extreme; still, I think that beginning the project by agreeing on a common manufacturing vocabulary would have been an activity worth “losing” time on. And I think it will be valuable on future projects as well, even less risky ones. Now the question is, should everybody learn the ISA-95 terminology? Since this standard spans every level of manufacturing software, it would not only help the MES project but also any further integration with any new business, execution or control system. Some might argue, probably schools and business gurus, that it is the supplier’s job to make himself understood by his customer and thus learn to speak his client’s language. I guess this choice will depend on several parameters, possibly, among others: the size of the project, the number of systems involved or the willingness of the customer… Because in the end, the customer is king.