How ISA-95 Adds Context To Industrial Data

ISA-95 isn’t just about integrating ERP and MES. It’s about helping you capture and organize context across the entire production process, so your data tells a complete story.

Why context matters?

Let’s say a QA test flags a product as out-of-spec. The natural questions are:

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⇨ What job was it part of?
⇨ Which line produced it?
⇨ What materials were used?
⇨ Who was operating the machine?
⇨ Was there a maintenance event before or after?

If you can’t answer those questions quickly, you’re not just dealing with a defect, you’re dealing with a data blind spot.

ISA-95 helps you capture these answers, systematically.

It does this by defining a structured activity model where all manufacturing actions and data points are tied to anchor objects.

Things like:

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✅ Equipment
✅ Job orders
✅ Material lots
✅ Personnel
✅ Work definitions

These are your context containers.

They allow you to ask:

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“What happened during this job?”
“What data is tied to this material lot?”
“How did this machine perform over the last three shifts?”

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