Home » Get Involved » Committees & Working Groups
Committees & Working Groups
MESA's Committees and Working Groups provide safe, non-commercial professional environments where ideas are always welcome and all contributors work to share best practices and continually move industry forward.
Within MESA, members gain when members contribute and there's always a place for dedicated professionals, like you! MESA's standing committees provide the core functions required to support the organization on an ongoing basis. Working groups lead the important discussions and deliver the industry-renown content MESA is known for. These deliverables, available as a member benefit, represent MESA's points of view on all the topics and challenges our community engages in addressing.
Standing Committees
MESA is a not-for-profit business league with tax-exempt status in the United States under Internal Revenue Service classification 501(c) 6. All revenues generated by MESA through sponsorships, memberships or other offerings are utilized to develop educational offerings in the form of peer-to-peer networks, published content and formal education classes in order to advance our membership's understanding of how and why to use Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions.
Our Finance Committee monitors the association's finances. The team prepares monthly reports for the International Board of Directors based on information provided by the contracted MESA Accountant, watching revenue forecasts and projected expenses and their impact on current and short-term cash position. The committee is responsible for managing the preparation of an annual operating budget and also reviews non-budgeted requests, making recommendations to the International Board or the Executive Committee for final disposition. The Finance Committee also provides insight and leadership, as requested by the International Board of Directors, for other committees with regard to revenue or expense-related questions or issues.
MESA provides a professional environment within which many diverse topics are discussed and initiatives run by an even more diverse collection of members. Managing this diversity in a fair, equitable way that gives such a broad community a unified voice would be essentially impossible without the proper organizational structure, policies and practices.
Our Governance Committee ensures our operating policies, procedures and structure are current and effective for supporting the association's stated goals. The team interfaces with association leaders on questions about established practices, regularly reviews our bylaws and recommends changes to any area of our operations that need updating or replacing for any reasons. The Governance Committee's focus is always on fairness within MESA and ensuring a level playing field for any and all contributors.
Governance Committee Mission:
- To review (and where necessary change/amend) existing processes/procedures, policies and structures of MESA and the respective documentation from the perspective of governance and compliance.
- Provide to the Board of Directors all necessary documents needed for the board to ensure compliance of the organization with all applicable rules and regulations for a not-for-profit organization and all applicable law.
- Provide to the members of MESA a simple way to understand the organization and to navigate its structure as well as giving them a general feeling for what is right and what is wrong.
Chair: Open Position
The MESA Knowledge Committee is the governing body that oversees and drives education and content creation for the association. Members and our extended community turn to MESA to refresh, be prepared and at the cutting edge of skills needed to advance industry. MESA plays a critical role in educating the global marketplace on HOW and WHY to use Smart Manufacturing. MESA has long been regarded for its content, and the Knowledge Committee is responsible for maintaining the impartiality, non-commercialism and proper focus of these important deliverables.
MESA has over 1,000 pieces of content in our online Resource Library. The internally-generated MESA content has been vetted through our consensus building and formal review process. The content roadmap and focus is driven by MESA’s Boards and Content Advisory Team (CAT); as well as through the grassroots efforts and interests of our membership.
MESA educates industry through the creation of:
- Webinars
- White papers and guidebooks
- Online self-paced and instructor-led courses through our Global Education Program (GEP)
- Presentations at industry events
- Surveys and studies
- And more!
Given the importance of volunteers to MESA's health and longevity, the importance of a strong Leadership Development Committee cannot be overstated. Chaired by the Immediate-Past Chair of the International Board of Directors, the Leadership Development Committee is responsible for the recruitment of the association's leaders for all standing committees and Boards of Directors. The team is responsible for nominating a slate of potential leaders to the International Board of Directors for approval for regular committee and Board elections and is also responsible for recommending replacements for leadership roles that are vacated outside of the normal election cycle. The Leadership Development Committee may also recommend or provide leadership training for current, future or potential MESA leaders.
Chair: Ananth Seshan, 5G Automatika
MESA speaks with the voice of industry's practitioners those manufacturers/producers and solution providers who do real work, have made real mistakes and have shown real business value in leveraging today's modern Information Technologies (IT) in their production operations. That voice is unique, and it's valuable. And, it's the job of our Marketing Committee to make sure our unified voice is heard.
Our Marketing Committee is chartered with establishing the value of MESA's voice in industry from the plant to the enterprise. The team works with all MESA committees and initiative owners throughout the world to promote relevant news and content to our global community, celebrating the innovation, competency and capabilities of our members. The committee also owns and executes the communications and social media plans with our ecosystem of members, sponsors, press and analysts to show the world the value of knowing what MESA knows. Finally, the committee monitors the global marketplace for important trends and issues and interfaces with MESA Staff Marketing personnel on core marketing, messaging, brand and strategy issues.
Chair: Open Position
MESA is a global community of like-minded professionals working together for the betterment of all. Our membership is extremely diverse, represented by manufacturers, producers, software providers, systems integrators, consultants, analysts and academics from companies of all sizes across many industries from over 40 countries around the world. This diversity makes us strong, and our members are why we're here.
Our Membership Committee is responsible for regularly evaluating the value of a MESA membership for all constituents and challenging our organization to improve that value. The team is also responsible for establishing and managing a sales pipeline for memberships and sponsorships and providing visibility to the Finance Committee, (International and Regional) Boards of Directors, MESA Staff and other committees. The committee should regularly evaluate pricing models and levels, making or vetting recommended changes and interface closely with the Marketing Committee to execute commercial membership-oriented campaigns.
Chair: Open Position
Working Groups & Sub-Committees
Continuous Asset Optimization (CAO) is an approach to managing the optimal deployment of assets to maximize profitability and predictability in product supply, focusing on real margin contribution by asset by product code. Rather than looking at an asset as a “black box” or on the basis of market value or depreciated value, companies can see how the asset is contributing to their profitability by modelling the asset/process and understanding the behaviour for real time inputs. In essence, CAO includes the development of a digital twin of the asset and applying machine learning to arrive at optimality in asset performance. CAO focusses on dynamically arriving at various possible future behaviours for different real time inputs to the model and thus it can act as a very effective tool for decision making for driving continuous optimality. Since the internal structure of the asset/process is modelled and the different states and state transitions are identified as regards asset performance, CAO will provide for multiple levers at an operational level for achieving increased throughput, availability, reliability, etc., which will all lead towards better profitability. At a strategic level, CAO shall directly drive better return on assets.
The CAO Working Group develops guidelines for the next generation APM practice. The guidelines will be disseminated in a series of workshops and piloted in the respective members' organizations. The outcome of the pilots shall be published. Visit the Continuous Asset Optimization Working Group Content Portal.
Chair: Ananth Seshan, 5G Automatika
CAO Working Group - Statement of Objectives
The MESA Cybersecurity Working Group develops original content on the specific topic of manufacturing or industrial systems cybersecurity. The Working Group will create technical content in various forms of media (i.e., written, webcast, presentation).
The functional scope of the work group includes all aspects of the cybersecurity of products, systems and solutions at levels 2 and 3 of the reference architecture (i.e., Manufacturing Operations and Control). In terms of the security life-cycle defined by ISA-62443 the scope includes the assessment, development, implementation and maintenance phases. Visit the Cybersecurity Working Group Content Portal.
Co-Chairs: Eric Cosman, OIT Concepts LLC and Chris Hamilton, Rockwell Automation
The objective of this working group is to maintain a presence for MESA on Wikipedia by periodically posting (or updating) definitions of MESA related terms on Wikipedia under the MESA name. The terms posted to MESA will also be updated in the MESA Collaborative Manufacturing Dictionary as well by the same working group.
Terms to be updated will be proposed either by members of the working group, or to members of the working group by other members of MESA. The proposed definitions for those terms will be posted in the Technical Committee section of Sharepoint for review and they will go through the normal MESA review process before being posted to Wikipedia.
Members posting to Wikipedia are required by the Wikipedia charter to post as an individual, but they are also allowed to post as an individual at an organization, so the proposal is that posters on the working group register IDs at Wikipedia such as "Dave N at MESA" so that MESA is visible in the posting, while conforming to the Wikipedia charter.
The working group goal will be posted (or updated) at least (on average) one new term per month on Wikipedia.
Acting Chair: Khris Kammer, OSIsoft
The MESA Analytics Working Groups are focused on how manufacturers successfully measure performance and improve it. This is your opportunity to work with other companies who have succeeded with operations and business performance metrics. Visit the Manufacturing Analytics Working Group Content Portal.
Chair: Chris Monchinski, Automated Control Concepts, Inc.
Metrics Guidebook & Framework Third Edition
MESA has offered a guidebook and framework for effective performance metrics since 2006. The team for the third edition is forming now, to update, improve, and expand this important reference work. The Guidebook and Framework introduces the role of metrics and the players, provides an overview of critical concepts about metrics and performance measurement processes including linking and aligning corporate to detailed plant metrics. The previous two editions are available to members on this site, from 2006 and 2011.
Chair: John Jackiw, Dassault Systemes
Other ideas? We welcome them.
All of these working groups were started as a result of the interests of MESA members. If you have an idea about performance measurement and metrics programs you don't see here, please let us know and we can start up an activity.
The purpose of the MESA MOM ISA-95 Maturity Model Working Group is to define and promote a MESA MOM Capability Maturity Model based on the ISA-95 set of standards for enterprise supply chain and Manufacturing Operations Management systems. The model can be used as a benchmark for comparison and as an aid to understanding where to make improvements in the interoperability of an organization's manufacturing operations management processes.
Anticipated deliverables the group will work on include:
- Maturity model guidebook
- Maturity model assessment training material
- Maturity model assessment tool
- Maturity model webinars
Chair: Open Position
Our Vision:
To become a world-class, industry recognized iMOM (integrated manufacturing center of excellence for the process industries, fostering communication, guidance and know-how on best practices, strategies, solution design and technologies relevant to layer 3 per the ISA-95 international standard, supporting the management of manufacturing operations towards achieving operational excellence. Visit the Process Industries Working Group Content Portal.
Our Mission:
The MESA iMOM for the Process Industries group is chartered to promote the application of best practices, by publishing articles and white papers, adopting and communicating a common cross-industry terminology and championing a conceptual framework for the design of the solutions and associated business processes relevant to layer 3 per the ISA-95 international standard.
Who should join:
Operations managers, production managers, maintenance managers, reliability managers, automation consultants, systems architects, business process leaders and IT professionals who are willing to share and exchange knowledge around the Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) applications layer for the process industries. We welcome also passionate individuals and college students who seek to learn about MES/iMOM from experts in the industry.
Chair: Fayez Kharbat, Saudi Aramco
As technology continues to change - and often eliminate - traditional boundaries between production and business, one constant remains: your process. Everyone knows there's value in automating all your processes, but there are also challenges...
- where do your business processes stop and your production processes start? Or, is that backward?
- do they overlap?
- how do departments manage intersections and conflicts?
- where do today's IT, Engineering and Process solutions fit?
Chair: Open Position
How can I justify investing in manufacturing enterprise solutions such as MES and MOM? This is perhaps the most frequently asked question we get at MESA. A dedicated team of members has written the Guidebook ROI and Justification for MES/MOM. It covers all of the aspects of making the business case: Defining the project, identifying benefits, identifying costs, and conducting the cost-benefit analysis. This guidebook gives you guidelines as well as issues to examine as you bring your production, IT, accounting, and management teams together to set realistic expectations to get a strong return on this important investment.
Chair: Open Position
The Smart Manufacturing Working Group is where you help build the research and content that guides the industry. The goal of the Working Group is to demystify and provide guidance on topics related to technology-driven initiates in manufacturing including the Digital Manufacturing, Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT), Industrie 4.0, Model-Based Enterprise, and Smart Manufacturing. Check out all the resources the Smart Manufacturing Working Group has developed here.
The Smart Manufacturing Working Group puts forward coherent guidance beyond the marketing hype stressing real business value, practical paths and building blocks to future connected manufacturing value chains. These activities are gaining momentum, and we are looking for motivated leaders and contributors to help steer and drive them.
Our working group expects help provide consistent messaging in Smart Manufacturing-related topics internally and externally, interacting with industry organizations and consortia to drive a common understanding for all including NIST, SMLC, DMDII, ISA, OAGI, MIMOSA and other industry organizations.
Additional work includes:
- A white paper explaining how different IT technologies are threaded together to create new levels of efficiency and connectivity in manufacturing organizations
- A member survey on adoption of standards for connectivity
- A library of 'Manufacturing Business Processes' or 'Use Cases' that map production processes across internal operating departments and supply chains
Smarter manufacturing won't happen without people exchanging ideas and collaborating across the operations, automation and information technology ranks. They're not simple discussions, but we're the right people to drive them, and we encourage you to join us.
Chair: Conrad Leiva, CESMII
The MESA XML Working Group develops and maintains the B2MML (Business to Manufacturing Markup Language) specifications. These specifications are XML Schema Definitions that are implementations of the ISA-95 Enterprise/Control System standard, the ISA-88 Batch Control standard and ISO 22400 Key Performance Indictators (KPIs) for Manufacturing Operations Management standards. The committee updates and verifies the markup languages to keep them consistent with the latest ISA, IEC and ISO standards.
The XML Working Group is also MESA's focal point for our membership on the Open O&M (Open Operations & Management) Initiative's Manufacturing Joint Working Group (JWG). OpenO&M is an initiative of multiple industry standards organizations working to provide a harmonized set of standards for the exchange of Operations & Maintenance (O&M) data and associated context. It is an open, collaborative, effort composed of diverse groups of relevant organizations and subject matter experts organized in industry specific Joint Working Groups (JWG) that are focused on enabling O&M application interoperability. The goal of the JWGs is to offer end users and suppliers a consistent set of data exchange standards that will avoid duplication and confusion.
Group work is done electronically, with web meetings and email, so physical travel is not required to participate. Participation in the MESA XML Working Group lets you help in the development and improvement of some of the most widely used manufacturing IT standards. To join the committee or to send feedback on B2MML, send a request to b2mml@mesa.org. Visit the XML Working Group Content Portal.