OASIS Mulls Production Planning and Scheduling Standard

11/17/2003

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Members of the international standards consortium, OASIS, have organized to advance an XML-based standard for collaborative planning and scheduling in manufacturing. The new OASIS Production Planning and Scheduling (PPS) Technical Committee will develop common object models and corresponding XML schemas which can communicate to establish intra- and inter-enterprise planning and scheduling. The Technical Committee plans to conduct its work in Japanese and provide English translations of its documents and deliverables.

"Shop floor management must collaborate with enterprise management, so that manufacturers can react to dynamic changes in the market," said Yasuyuki Nishioka of the PSLX Consortium, convenor of the OASIS PPS Technical Committee. "Our goal is to develop a standard that will enable manufacturers to implement decision support systems that provide bi-directional communication between planning and scheduling software."

The PPS specification will address data handling for production planning orders, inventory levels, resource capacity, and scheduled or in-progress operations. PPS will be designed to reduce the expense and increase the speed and flexibility of developing new planning and scheduling systems, particularly for applications that include multi-vendor products or legacy systems.

OASIS PPS Technical Committee members include Fujitsu, Hitachi, Ricoh, and others. Participation remains open to all organizations and individuals. Representation from a wide variety of manufacturing industries is key; system integrators, software vendors, database designers, industrial specialists, and planning/scheduling application engineers are especially welcome.

"This is the first OASIS Technical Committee to conduct its work in Japanese," noted Karl Best, vice president of OASIS, in a keynote address at the OASIS Open Standards Days held today in Tokyo. "Clearly, Asian companies are moving beyond adopting and adapting e-business standards created in Europe and North America. It is exciting to see the active role OASIS members in Japan are taking to drive the international standards that affect their markets."

PPS expands the growing body of supply chain standardization efforts at OASIS, which includes technical committees for Electronic Procurement Standardization (EPS), Materials Markup Language (MML), and Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS). OASIS currently has more than 60 active technical committees.

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and interoperability within and between marketplaces. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 2,500 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.