Emerson’s innovations in process control magazine provides insights into many of the latest technology and service innovations occurring. The latest edition opens with an operating training simulator (OTS) successful implementation at Iberian Lube Base Oils Company (ILBOC) in Cartagena, Spain. The article highlights some of the key benefits:

Emerson’s OTS provided ILBOC with a number of benefits including reduced operating costs, due to the ability to identify potential issues during initial start-up, shutdown and normal operations. Having well-trained operators reduced plant start-up and shutdown time and the production of off-specification product.

Energy consumption is a significant issue at process plants. The experience and understanding of the process gained through the training is enabling operators to identify potential problems such as loss of power failure, or cooling water, that would reduce the energy efficiency of the plant.

Emerson Process Management Europe president Roel Van Doren then described the issue the process manufacturing and production industries face in executing large capital projects:

…65% of projects greater than $1bn fail, meaning that companies exceed their budgets by more than 25% or miss their schedules by more than 50%.

He describes how Project Certainty helps to address this challenge. Project Certainty is:

…a transformational approach to project execution, which will cut costs, reduce complexity and significantly improve the ability to accommodate changes throughout the lifecycle of the project. In practice this means that project performance will improve by eliminating unnecessary work and materials by automating the steps in the process and using standardised technologies.

Other articles in the magazine feature:

• Emerson Process Management group vice president Jim Nyquist on Increasing Project Certainty
• Vice president projects and services John Nita on Adopting Main Automation Contractor services earlier
• Director of global industry consulting Chris Hamlin on Securing the return on your investment
• Director of strategic services Europe Michel Da Silva on Distributed project engineering
• Dynamic simulation and process optimisation business manager Ronnie Bains on Dynamic simulation supports successful startups
• Other short articles including configure-to-order cabinets, smart commissioning and specification process streamlining.

Check out these articles and join these folks April 12-14 at the Emerson Exchange conference in Brussels.