“Our world just got turned upside down,” are the words Emerson Process Management boss Steve Sonnenberg chose to open the keynote address at this year’s Emerson EMEA User Group Exchange in Brussels.
For the immediate future, the new reality is an automation market shaped by the low oil price and sharply lower investment in upstream oil and gas projects. “This brings with it both new threats and new opportunities,” Sonnenberg explained to delegates. “The only sure way to deliver results in such a challenging new business environment is for process manufacturers continuously to achieve performance that places them in the top quartile.”
It is here that Emerson sees the opportunity with its Project Certainty as the enabler. Project Certainty is a new way of thinking – rather than a service – that incorporates many of the company’s existing technology offerings and some new ones still in the pipeline. It has its roots in a survey which showed that more than 65% of capital projects over a billion dollars fail, in the sense that either they came in more than 25% over budget or they are more than 50% late, or both. For smaller projects, around 500 million dollars, more than 35% fail.
To compete globally, organisations must invest in projects that improve operations and maximise profitability. However, for top quartile performance, it is essential to keep both capital and ongoing operating costs at a minimum.
Increased complexity is the problem that project managers wrestle with as they struggle to control the three critical elements of cost, risk and schedule. Reliability is the headache of the production people as they battle to cope through the first few years of problems associated with an inadequately commissioned facility. Emerson’s Project Certainty catalyses solutions for both of these through its principles of eliminating cost, reducing complexity and accommodating change.
The key is early engagement. “If our customers involve us right from project conception, then we can deploy the ideas of Project Certainty in ways that will take the automation component right off the critical path,” emphasised Sonnenberg.
It hinges on pre-emptive engineering and design studies to define the project outcomes together with the high-impact strategies needed to meet these goals. Despite traditionally accounting for only about 4% of overall project investment, automation has the unique ability to eliminate cost, reduce complexity and accommodate late-stage project changes, beyond just the automation discipline. The benefits are a reduction in overall project spending, as well as significantly less volatility in budget variance.
The core technologies in the Project Certainty toolbox include electronic marshalling, industrial wireless, pervasive sensing, virtualisation, smart field acceptance testing and the implementation of a single point of project truth.
Electronic marshalling, based on Emerson’s CHARMs technology, eliminates up to 75% of the work required to bring a measurement from the field to control room. These adaptable devices replace the need for intricate individual connections, allowing all of the plant devices to be moved or changed with ease, in response to any late modifications in the automation architecture. Industrial wireless provides the flexibility to add new sensing points at the last minute, without the need to dig up or alter any previously laid cable infrastructure. Virtualisation divorces the software from the hardware, allowing full functional testing of the code, well before the installation of any of the hardware on site. Appropriate combination of these three elements significantly reduces the complexity of any automation project.
Rethinking the ideas associated with two traditional money-gobbling elements is the way to slash project expenditure. A probing reliability analysis conducted as part of the initial engineering design work can substantially reduce the total spares requirement. This way, only the critical components are kept as inventory, supported by suitable breakdown agreements with key suppliers. The pièce de résistance though is the ability to perform remote field acceptance testing and generate all the required documentation from a single point of project truth. According to Emerson, this can reduce commissioning time by up to 82%.
Elevating its customers into the first quartile of efficient manufacturing is the Emerson end game. Project Certainty is the enabler, and the pay-offs reflect in the bottom line through large capital projects completed on time on budget, and plant operation at maximum reliability from day one. It is stability in a topsy-turvy world, but first you must embrace the idea that the only way to survive now is to do things better.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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