Organizations across many industries use parts of the ISA-95 standard to improve manufacturing operations and system integration. While the most well-known application of ISA-95 is for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), it’s also applied to production tracking, data standardization, automation, or real-time decision making.
This outlines some key vendors that use ISA-95 as part of their manufacturing model. Spoiler: Many partial implementations exist, but only Rhize offers the most comprehensive and flexible application.
Rhize
What it does: Rhize unifies manufacturing data from any source into a standardized manufacturing ontology based on ISA-95. As a “headless” backend with database, rules engine, and workflow interface it transforms fragmented operational data into an application-ready foundation for enterprise-scale analytics and automation.
How it uses ISA-95: Rhize uses ISA-95 as its foundational data model to provide a standardized schema and ontology for all manufacturing operations. It maps relationships using ISA-95’s ontology to embed every data event with the context necessary for rigorous and consistent governance.
Scope of implementation: Comprehensive / Full-scale Architecture. Rhize builds its entire database and graph-based operational foundation natively around the ISA-95 framework. Rhize does not require users to implement every part of the standard right away, but it is built to support the full model as operations grow and become more complex.
HighByte
What it does: Industrial DataOps and data pipeline platform designed to merge, model, and route data between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) environments.
How it uses ISA-95: HighByte features a specialized “Namespace” tool that organizes data sources into a structured asset hierarchy. This allows downstream applications to query a Unified Namespace (UNS) for the latest contextualized data.
Scope of implementation: Targeted (Equipment Hierarchy). HighByte’s UNS views mainly focus on the ISA-95 equipment structure, such as Enterprise, Site, Area, and Work Cell. It is designed to organize and route data, but it does not fully support other ISA-95 areas like material tracking, inventory management, or detailed workflow processes.
Sepasoft
What it does: Serves as the functional, bi-directional bridge between plant-floor Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks.
How it uses ISA-95: Sepasoft uses production segments to standardize, schedule, and orchestrate manufacturing workflows. It maps physical plant assets into ISA-95 equipment classes and implements resource and definition objects to strictly enforce and document task inputs, operator instructions, and tracking requirements.
Scope of implementation: Broad / Operational (MOM-focused). Sepasoft focuses on the main information and operations areas of the ISA-95 standard. By its own audit, it supports partial implementations of some entities in the part 4 standard.
Siemens Opcenter
What it does: Siemens Opcenter is a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) platform that coordinates plant execution, advanced scheduling, quality control, and industrial analytics.
How it uses ISA-95: While its product documentation is not specific, Opcenter apparently uses ISA-95 as the data model inspiration for various modules.
Scope of implementation: Modular Execution & Analytical Responses. Different Siemens Opcenter modules focus on specific areas that overlap with Part 2 ISA-95 entities such as material quality, production scheduling, equipment status, and manufacturing processes.
Rockwell Automation
What it does: Rockwell’s manages unique identification, verification, compliance aggregation, and tracking of regulated pharmaceutical and consumer goods packaging from the individual item level up to pallet distribution.
How it uses ISA-95: Rockwell Automation distinguishes execution boundaries between real-time machine-level packaging serialization (Levels 1 & 2) and enterprise corporate serial number repositories or global compliance layers (Levels 4 & 5). This model is found in Part 1 of the standard, though its actual origins go back to the Purdue model.
Scope of implementation: Process-Specific (Material Tracking & Genealogy). Unclear from the documentation, but & trace the track & trace and serialization modules appear to have fields for material lot, product identification, and workflow compliance verification, which correspond to some entities in ISA-95.
The Big Picture
Despite our obvious bias, we’re comfortable saying that Rhize has, by far, the world’s most comprehensive implementation of SA-95.
For small use cases and one-off applications, partial implementations of inspirations are perfectly appropriate. However, as manufacturers incorporate more systems and use cases, applying the common model pays compound interest. When choosing a vendor based on ISA-95, think about how important it is to break down data silos and build a scalable foundation for the future.