Emerson Process Experts

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Every capital project has it challenges, usually around tight budgets and tight schedules, not to mention team flexibility and changes in scope.

Recently at the Interphex conference, the big industry gathering for Life Science manufacturers and suppliers, Emerson's Michalle Adkins, Steve Murray, and Dawn Marruchella presented a paper entitled, "Optimizing Your Automation Investment By Mitigating Risk."

I had a chance to catch up with Steve who is a consultant and project lead engineer in the Life Sciences industry organization to understand what experience they shared with those who attended their presentation.

Steve shared five strategies for helping to reduce risk in projects. These include:

1. Set Expectations
2. Prototype
3. Establish Project Guidelines
4. Use Global Standards
5. Leverage Testing

Set Expectations. Risks in miscommunication, budget, schedule, and overall project execution can be reduced by having the project team (both manufacturer and supplier(s)) align on the expectations for the project. The expectations include the deliverables, documentation, schedule, procedures and processes, tracking metrics, and the overall level of automation and integration between systems and processes. This helps aim everyone's efforts in the same direction and discovers efficiencies which can be gained as the project is implemented.

Prototype. Risks in budget, schedule, changes, and project execution can be reduced with a prototyping strategy. Prototyping helps incorporate operational philosophies into the upfront engineering, helps ensure consistent look and feel, and provides a visual medium to communicate designs to the project team, manufacturing, maintenance, and other interested parties. The prototype lays the foundation for the project guidelines and demonstrates methods for software testing, operator training, and process simulation. This strategy can reduce changes later in the project. There is much more to say on what and how to prototype which I'll save for a future post.

Establish Project Guidelines. Risks in budget, schedule, maintainability, and project execution can be reduced by establishing clear project guidelines. The agreement of established procedures, practices, and fundamental philosophies at the front of a project help avoid project-wide changes later in the project. These guidelines should cover execution methodology, change control, document control, testing and all the team member roles and responsibilities. It covers all aspects of the automation project including operator interface, batch architecture, continuous control, devices and I/O, and integration with external systems.

Use Global Standards. Risks in budget, schedule, maintainability, and training can be reduced by establishing or using already established global standards. Global standards in this context refer to standard, modular, pre-tested pieces of automation like control modules, equipment modules, phases, etc. These standards incorporate existing knowledge and best practices, help facilitate communication between team members, and shorten the learning curve for new members to the project team. Ongoing maintenance and support is easier for the 80-90% of the project configuration that typically can use global standards. These standards are often provided by automation suppliers since they see more projects and can more efficiently iterate towards an ideal standard. In addition, spreading the development costs across a broad project base can significantly reduce these costs.

Leverage Testing. Like using global standards, risks in budget, schedule, maintainability, and training can be reduced by leveraging good testing practices. For highly regulated Life Science manufacturers, everything needs to be tested and documented. The key is that each level of testing (supplier, acceptance, commissioning, IQ, OQ, PQ) should build on the previous layer and not repeat it. Testing is always a risk-based endeavor. There can never be so much as to eliminate every possible problem scenario. At some point the cost can drive a project cost more than anything else. It's better to spread testing cost for standard items as widely as possible, and load most of the testing into the front end of a project since testing gets progressively more expensive the further it is done in a project schedule. The key is a solid test plan which identifies the risk areas from all members of the project team and finding ways to combine some of the testing levels like commissioning and qualification.

Steve and other experienced Life Science Industry experts have shared their wisdom in many papers over the years including S88 batch project specs and S88 project requirements.

Tags: pharmaceutical | biotech | validation | project management | project testing | project execution | risk |

April 28, 2006 in Life Sciences, in Project Services | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

For those not already subscribed to CONTROL magazine's Editor-in-Chief Walt Boye's blog, you're missing a great post entitled, Why Does Emerson Win?

OK, OK, you may think this somewhat self-serving of me to point out this particular post and it would be tough for me to argue the point.

Actually I'm also using this opportunity to promote your adoption of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) by giving our RSS Starter Kit that I mentioned in an earlier post a try.

If you try it, you'll be subscribed to Walt's blog, this blog, and other topics of interest. It can also serve to help you find what you need faster than by not adopting RSS.

Tags: Emerson | RSS Starter Kit | RSS |

April 27, 2006 in Miscellaneous | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Building on my prior mentioned rising energy costs post, manufacturers are looking beyond optimizing their throughput, quality, and plant availability at how they can optimize the use of energy, since this directly impacts their bottom line.

Changing process conditions causes changes to the plant utility system which impacts: power demand, steam demand, fuel balance, emission targets, and the dynamics of the operation. Effectively managing utility system operations must consider the competing economic and production issues in a timely manner to improve the profitability of the production process.

I spoke with Peter Stanley, an Energy Management consultant in the Performance Monitoring and Optimization business unit of Emerson's Asset Optimization division. Steve and the team typically see opportunities for a 2-5% reduction in annual fuel bills by applying an Energy Management application to optimize the utility system. This can translate into as much as 25% of utility annual fuel spend.

The first step is to look at the major areas of energy usage. The first area is in the steam balance which is the steam required to provide heat across the site. Units may be importers or exporters of steam, and the amount of steam produced or consumed changes with throughput and operating mode.

The next area is power balance, again by looking at the importers and exporters of electricity. Many plants have on site generation in addition to what they purchase from the local utility, and can export excess power back to the utility grid.

Fuel balance looks at the mix of fuel gas and waste or by products which have little or no value. The objective is to consume in the lowest cost manner that raises the maximum energy for the process units.

Environmental constraints look at NOx and SOx levels and avoiding the maximum limits based upon the regulatory statutes and availability of emissions trading practices.

In addition to changing process conditions based upon what is being produced, the prices of fuel and power changes. Contractual arrangements for the import or export of electricity, fuel, or steam also impact the optimization.

A final area of consideration is the performance of the existing equipment including the boilers, gas & steam turbines, recovery steam generators, etc.

Building a solution with Emerson energy management experts and the AMS Optimizer, it is possible to continually deter the set of operating setpoints that will allow the utility operations to continually run at its economic optimum based upon all these factors and constraints.

Peter describes the approach where Emerson partners with its customers to deliver a guaranteed level of benefits typically within six months for a completed system. Payment for services and software is not due until the end of the project when the guaranteed level of benefits has been achieved.

Peter stressed that all projects have paybacks within 12 months and Internal Rate of Returns greater than 200%. Support of the optimizer solution is provided with a long term support contract.

It sounds like in an era of high energy costs and a solution with performance guarantees, that this is definitely an area to consider if your manufacturing process consumes lots of energy.

Tags: energy | asset optimization | utilities | steam | fuel | emissions | combustion | AMS |

April 26, 2006 in Energy Management | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Walt Boyes, Editor in Chief for CONTROL magazine, has been closely reporting wireless technology and associated standards efforts in his Sound Off!!! blog. Some recent posts include:

Wireless-- who's to blame?
What about Wireless HART?
Are SP100 and HART Wireless Back on Track? Inquiring Minds Want to Know!
More Emerson Wireless
Bob Karshnia, from Emerson, speaks out on wireless
Emerson Declares Wireless...is it war?

Bill Morrison, Emerson Process Management Group's Director of Worldwide Marketing Communication responded to several of these which Walt posted in today's Emerson Speaks Out on Wireless! post.

A key point which Bill makes is:

Like several of our peers in the HART Working Group, we enthusiastically pursue the development of a standard. We openly share learnings gained from our trials with the Working Group. In fact, nearly 5 months ago (December, 2005), Emerson posted an open letter to the HART Foundation pledging our commitment to the donation of IP in an effort to further the standard. Our commitment to collaborate on a standard is clear, demonstrated through action.

I happened to be in the very first meeting where the OPC communications standard initiative was kicked off in the mid '90s. Our technology organization took the lead as master editor of version 1.0 of the specification. Obviously the commitment in time, energy and expense for participation on these standards bodies would not happen without Emerson's commitment to seeing these open, interoperable standards become reality.

Tags: wireless | Foundation fieldbus | HART | OPC | open interoperable | standards |

April 25, 2006 in Interoperability, in Wireless | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

I've shared in earlier posts in the data management category, how process manufacturers are looking at their work processes including the information flows to become more responsive their customers. Although my earlier examples were North American, the need is global.

I caught up with Bas Mutsaers in our Rijswijk office in the Netherlands. Bas leads a team of 10 MES/Integration engineers for projects in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The folks on his team average five years of industry and application experience.

As a result of their project work, they have expertise in applying the ISA S95 and S88 standards, as well industry guidelines and regulations like GAMP, the U.S. FDA's 21CFR Part 11 and MESA.

Bas said that many of the process manufacturers that have applied Emerson's PlantWeb architecture integrate other components on the plant floor from other automation suppliers. By integrating these in a standard way with their scheduling and planning systems using the standards available, the real benefits start to show for the manufacturer's operations group. By using OSIsoft's RtPM software for their other applications connected to their manual processes, their maintenance and quality systems as well as hundreds of other standard applications can be integrated with this supported software platform.

The new PI Protocol Converter product from OSIsoft connects the embedded DeltaV Continuous Historian with OSIsoft client applications like PI Process Book, PI DataLink, PI ActiveView, and PI RTPortal, making the information from the manufacturing process to various people throughout the organization to improve decision making and work flow. Bas' group has built many reusable tools for the many industries Emerson Process Management serves. These include mass balance calculations, nomination tools, emission tools, and standard production reports.

These connections provide the basis for the flow of information about inventories, continuous processes, batch processes, and packaging areas to the scheduling and planning systems to more quickly and efficiently respond to demand. Bas and his consultants develop solutions based upon work processes the process manufacturer is seeking to improve.

The real benefit begins when planning systems are connected to the plant floor and possible schedules are made based on the information in intelligent devices that are often part of the more critical loops. The protocol converter also can connect to the OSIsoft Enterprise Server which integrates a broader range of applications.

Bas believes a successful data management project includes the following elements:

• The right answers are not always found in the technical tools that are under the hood.
• Success lies in the experience working with the various technologies in the field and by applying the knowledge of working processes together with the manufacturer's vision. Bas calls this the recipe for success.
• Implementing the recipe for success requires a team consisting of at least 4 functions: technical architects, current or future users of the solution, experienced Emerson and manufacturer project managers to keep the team focused on the vision, milestones, and scope changes. A sponsor with a vision knows where the opportunities to generate real business results exist.

The people provide the basis for the flows of information about inventories, continuous processes, batch processes, and packaging areas to the scheduling and planning systems to more quickly and efficiently respond to demand. By automating the critical processes in such a way these efficiencies can be realized.

Emerson has worked for more than a decade with OSIsoft starting first with embedded technologies and then in forming an alliance to provide integration services around the world. The demand for these services has continued to grow, with integration teams now in Canada, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Tags: information integration | data management | MES | OSIsoft |

April 24, 2006 in Data Management | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

I recently heard a presentation from one of our Chemical industry experts, Peter Cox, an Operations Consultant based in our Emerson Belgium office. Peter spent 14 years with BASF in various engineering and management positions before joining Emerson.

One of the key issues European Union chemical manufacturers are facing is that they ensure compliance with the SEVESO II Directive released in 2005 (COMAH in the United Kingdom.)

The guidelines were named after an industrial accident which occurred in Seveso, Italy in 1976.

The directive states the requirement for a mandatory review to prove compliance with the safety regulations at least every five years for every plant in the European Union and U.K which falls under these directives.

In an earlier post I discussed how Emerson safety experts are helping process manufacturers use the IEC 61511 performance-base safety standards to address these safety regulations.

Peter believes that Chemical manufacturers must take a holistic look at the safety lifecycle from risk identification, to the classification of these risks, to the design of the safety function, through the ongoing maintenance and testing of these safety functions.

Emerson is helping Chemical manufacturers in this area with safety expertise and smart safety instrumented system technologies.

Tags: chemical manufacturers | European Union | SEVESO | COMAH | IEC 61511 | safety lifecycle |

April 20, 2006 in Chemical, in Safety | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Process manufacturers are pressed by their shareholders to improve their return on assets. To do this, they must get more out of their plants, people, and systems to respond more quickly to their customer requests than their competitors can respond. This response time can be the difference needed to avoid commodity pricing.

So how are manufacturers integrating their businesses to become more agile and more predictable? It starts by better linking your enterprise resource planning systems to your plants. According to SAP AG's Global Director of the Chemical & Pharmaceutical industries from a 2005 ARC Forum:

If you install SAP for traditional ERP functionality but don’t link to your Plants, you leave about 40 to 60% of the benefits on the table.

You may recall Gary Silverman from an earlier post. I spoke with him about the characteristics of projects which have successfully gone down the path of improving their manufacturing processes through better information integration.

Gary says first and foremost, companies need to see this process as a journey. It's much more than point-to-point integration between business and automation systems. Since the impact is on people and existing business processes it requires high-level leadership within the manufacturer. Groups that traditionally have been very separate like Information Technology and Engineering must get on the same page for significant business results to be achieved.

Once on the journey, Gary stressed the key areas to get right around the improvement of manufacturing automation is the data model and the process model.

The data model identifies the capabilities and business functions required at each connection point between the ERP system including: inventory management, production control/scheduling, quality management, and plant maintenance with the automation level including: process control systems, OEM/skid-based systems, batch systems, process historians, and the plant floor relational database.

The process model defines the flow from customer order and/or order forecast back through the business process defining the dependent requirement required to meet the packing schedule. The storage locations contain the physical work-in-process inventories from raw materials to the finished product ready for shipment.

Gary summed up what makes a successful project as strong leadership/vision, a well thought out architecture, and picking the right pilot project looking at factors such as availability, capability of resources, and the ability to execute. Once the learning and benefits can be measured versus the critical success factors, the deployment can roll out more broadly to other plants using the same architecture, infrastructure, and data model.

Tags: business processes | information integration | SAP | MES | history | data model | process model |

April 18, 2006 in Data Management | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Process manufacturing professionals, like those in many industries, live increasingly in information overload. The situation is exacerbated by the expectation of doing more often with fewer resources, especially in world areas like North America and Western Europe with their well established markets.

Automation professionals charged with the responsibilities of maintaining and modernizing their automation systems must keep pace with ongoing changes in the operating systems, automation software, and device drivers, not to mention any operating system security updates and patches. These responsibilities have grown as newer systems have been built on commercially available technologies like Ethernet, Windows operating systems, and open, interoperable communications standards specific to process manufacturers like OPC, HART, Foundation fieldbus, etc.

We received a clear message from our DeltaV system customers around the globe that it was very difficult to keep up with all the changes and sort out what was applicable to them, given their current versions of hardware and software.

To meet this need for more focused, relevant information particular to their systems, our SureService team created Guardian Support, which links the system administrators to the DeltaV experts at Emerson and to the extended community of system administrators throughout the company's global enterprise.

I spoke with Randy Pratt, a Product Engineering Application Specialist on our SureService support team. Randy is another one of the veterans around here, well known by many Emerson customers. I like the team's guiding motto that Randy shared with me, "We make the system you’ve got even better."

Guardian basically collects and provides a snapshot of all the version information in a DeltaV system, from the operating systems in the workstations, controllers, and I/O devices.

It filters the information system administrators receive to just what they have in their system, so that the information is focused and relevant. This information may include operating system security updates, patches, knowledge base articles, hardware warranty information, and more.

Randy added that the flip side of the coin is that Emerson support experts have access to this same information to rapidly solve any issues that may arise over the life of the system. This can save quite a bit of time when working through an issue by knowing all the versions without having ask, or dig around for it.

It also helps the system administrators better plan lifecycle issues associated with the underlying technologies. Commercially available technologies rapidly evolve. A recent example is the parallel port we've known and loved on our PCs have been going away as USB ports take over. The more advance notice that Guardian Support can provide, the better these changes can be planned and scheduled.

Tags: system support | information overload | lifecycle support | support services |

April 14, 2006 in Support Services | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

You know you need to periodically get your car’s oil changed and the lube oil system checked if you want the engine to last over the life you own your car.

It’s the same for many process manufacturers who have large, critical turbomachinery assets. These can include air and gas compressors, steam turbines, power recovery turbines, power generating equipment, etc.

Like the oil required for your car engine, lube oil skids maintain oil flow to the bearings, seals, and servo-controls on these critical turbomachinery assets. The lube oil skids must react very quickly in the event of an oil pump trip or other disturbance condition.

I spoke with Mark Coughran, an Emerson Control Performance consultant who was involved in a recent plant turnaround at a Texas Gulf coast petrochemical manufacturer.

Mark said the challenge with the lube oil skids is to maintain the oil pressure in these disturbance conditions, since the compressor or turbine will trip and the plant will lose production during the often lengthy restart procedure.

For this petrochemical manufacturer, Mark used his expertise acquired over the years of working with these skids along with Emerson's Entech Toolkit to find the fastest stable tuning of the pressure controllers.

In this particular case, Mark estimates the cost in lost production from a single turbomachine trip dwarfs the cost of his applied expertise.

Emerson also has online Machinery Health Monitoring to predict conditions which may cause a trip and alert operators in time to avoid a trip. I’ll have more on some of the experts who help manufacturers get the most out of this monitoring in a future post.

Tags: turbomachinery | lube oil | pressure control | petrochemical |

April 12, 2006 in Plant Equipment | Comments (0)

One of our popular presenters at the annual Emerson Exchange is Pete Sharpe. I think that like his last name indicates, he is one sharp person, and people generally like hearing him share his expertise.

Pete has quite a bit of experience with more than 20 years implementing APC for Emerson as well as other suppliers including Setpoint, AspenTech and MDC Technology.

One of his papers, Reducing Costs for APC Projects Using Pre-Engineered Application Module Libraries does helps describe how not only to get the benefits the advanced process control can deliver, but do it for less cost than process manufacturers have typically incurred in the past.

Advanced Process Control (APC) has been used for quite a while and delivered by many automation suppliers. Some savings Pete has seen on some of the projects he's worked on include:

• Increased capacity - 3-10%


• Quality variability reduction - 30-80%


• Increased recovery - 2-5%


• Reduced energy per ton - 3-5%

These types of improved performance has moved MPC from specialty purpose tools for few industries like refining and petrochemicals, into the mainstream that all industries can use, even for batch processes.

Pete believes it's best to start with the current economics of your process. If there are issues related to capacity, variability, waste, or energy usage, than it warrants a closer look to see if APC might be something to address these issues.

The key to the lower costs is bundling the APC into specific applications. This takes the expertise of Pete and Emerson's advanced automation experts in the projects they have implemented and packaged this expertise with:

• Pre-engineered, tested, documented and supported APC modules


• Standard functional design with fill-in-the-blanks tables


• Built-in performance monitoring calculations


• Bundled DeltaV APC license fees

Over the past couple of years, many of these SmartProcess applications have been developed and applied to help process manufacturers reduce some of the issues that they have been battling.

Tags: advanced process control | APC | application | quality | variability | energy usage |

April 10, 2006 in Process Optimization | Comments (0)

You don’t have to look too hard to find news stories (here, here, here) of rising oil prices and their impact on process manufacturers around the globe.

Refineries and petrochemical manufacturing processes can especially require vast amounts of energy to process the feedstocks into intermediate or final products.

I spoke recently with Doug White, who leads our advanced automation services consultants for Emerson Process Management. Some of the folks I’ve written about like James, Eric, and Lou are senior consultants in Doug’s organization.

Doug mentioned that one of the units at which refiners and petrochemical manufacturers should take a close look is the fired heater which provides the required heat for the distillation process. In many plants, these units were built 10-15 years ago or more. Most were built in times when natural gas was extremely inexpensive. There was little need for energy efficient designs—so even today they consume energy at higher rates than they could.

He sees these units as a quick way for manufacturers to save costs and improve their bottom lines.

Doug described these opportunities and gives very practical advice on how to get the project assessed, implemented, and sustained in an Oil & Gas Journal article entitled: Advanced automation technology reduces refinery energy costs. Some steps Doug recommends from the assessment phase:

1. Data gathering. Compile information about existing systems.
2. Interviews with plant staff. Find current energy-use problem areas, understand current operational procedures, and stimulate ideas on possible changes.
3. Evaluation of plant energy economics. Understand what are the major users and their costs of operation.

Doug's team has packaged some of their expertise coupled with advanced control software into a SmartProcess Heater Optimizer application.

If you are one of the manufacturers struggling with higher energy costs, this article is well worth the read to develop a plan to reduce these high energy costs.

Update: Repaired broken hyperlinks.

Tags: refining | petrochemicals | fired heater | distillation | project assessment | project implementation |

April 3, 2006 in Energy Management, in Fired Heater, in Refining | Comments (0) | Trackback (2)