“Ingenuity shapes the world we live in today,” were the words Emerson Process Management president, Steve Sonnenberg, chose to open the 2014 Global User Group Exchange held this year in Orlando, Florida.
The agility which aligns the company’s business strategy to emerging needs in the market is a prime example. Sonnenberg explained how he sees Emerson as a ‘listening’ organisation with flexible investment and technology roadmaps all designed to make it easier for its customers to meet their commitments to shareholders and the market.
The inspiration behind these roadmaps was explained at the subsequent press conferences where it became evident that maintenance and reliability had shifted into sharp focus on the organisation’s list of newly identified business opportunities.
Reliability, or rather the lack of it, is a prime cause of unnecessary operational expenditure, to which the loss of revenue from the associated plant downtime must also be added. The negative effect on the bottom line is thus a double multiplier and this is why reliability as a business strategy makes such perfect sense. No surprise then that so many of today’s C-suite executives are realising the need for better management of their physical assets.
It is also the rationale behind Emerson’s recent acquisition of the reliability specialist Management Resources Group (MRG). Robert DiStefano, VP of the newly formed Reliability Consulting Process Systems and Solutions division, described how poor reliability performers spend four times more on maintenance than their top performing counterparts. He explained how, based on MRG’s 25 years of practical experience, a typical $1 billion plant can save up to $12 million in annual maintenance costs if it implements the right reliability strategy. This excludes the additional benefits associated with the corresponding 14% increase in uptime that can be achieved. (For more on this see the official company press release in 'Emerson launches reliability management consulting service'.)
In the Emerson view of things, reliability starts with the capacity to weave a continuously evolving array of sensors all the way down to the lowest levels of the manufacturing process. This pervasive ‘sensing of everything’ is what drives Emerson’s technology investment decisions and little wonder then that the second of the event press conferences was devoted to the new technology releases.
Chief strategic officer, Peter Zorino, hosted us journalists at the second press session where he explained the ideas behind pervasive sensing in terms of process safety, process control, HSSE (health, safety, security, environmental), process reliability and energy efficiency.
Pervasive sensing is set to change the fundamentals of automation. Driven by advances in industrial wireless and a reduction in the cost of sensors, many industrial facilities are already adopting pervasive sensing strategies to anticipate impending equipment failures, particularly in rotating or reciprocating machinery. Today though, industrial wireless is no longer just a monitoring solution. Thanks to Emerson’s ingenious PIDPlus controller technology, the time-related problems in the underlying mathematics have been resolved and reliable PID control over wireless is now possible, even with the relatively slow update rates required to conserve battery life. Zorino took the opportunity to announce that Emerson has licensed royalty-free patent rights to the technology through the HART Communication Foundation, which will allow PIDPlus to be custom created on most current and future automation platforms.
There was plenty more wireless fare on offer to substantiate the argument ‘the more you can measure, the more you can solve’. A new wireless gateway that incorporates both WirelessHART and Wi-Fi is supported by firmware designed to streamline the network interface, security set-up and field device configuration. Created to meet the requirements of smaller network applications, it anchors the new enhanced products for remote scada and RTU installations. Other notable additions to the portfolio include a wireless totalising transmitter for custody transfer applications, wireless vibration monitoring and the Rosemount 248 wireless temperature transmitter designed for easy installation and optimum plant efficiency.
The announcement that DeltaV version 13 includes Ethernet support as well as a connector to OSIsoft PI demonstrates that Emerson is not intent on involvement purely at the process level. These are the links to provide the historian, analytics and dashboards necessary to slice and dice the sensor data into the metrics required to support more intelligent operational and reliability decision making.
Ingenuity born out of listening was abundant everywhere at this year’s Exchange, not least in the exhibition halls where the human-centred design approach was very much in evidence. Perhaps though, the chi is best expressed in another line from Sonnenberg’s opening address: “The person next to you may have the answer to the problem you are struggling with today.”
The innovators at Emerson are brimming with the answers required to shape tomorrow’s manufacturing – automation à la mode ingenuity.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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