Emerson Process Experts

I had the opportunity to visit with Emerson's Tom Wallace who was here in Austin recently. I like to joke with Tom that a post I had done with him comparing and contrasting HART and Foundation fieldbus caused such a stir, that it produced one of this blog's highest monthly visitor totals to date.

So let's see what we can do this month! Tom takes a comparative look at some of the swirl that surrounds EDDL and FDT/DTM in a new paper, FDT/DTM, and Enhanced EDDL, what's best for the user. These are both technology enablers for field devices, automation systems and asset management applications.

If this is all acronym soup to you, here's Tom's brief description of these technology enablers:

Device functionality is invoked using Electronic Device Description Language, EDDL or DTM's [Device Type Manager]. The DD or DTM tells the host what functionality the device has, and how the functionality is invoked. It also tells the host how to do common maintenance functions such as calibration, trims, tests, and other device activities.

I'll start with Tom's conclusion and then highlight some of his supporting points. He concludes:

In my opinion, there is a better technical implementation based primarily on ease of implementation and support. That solution is to use EDDL for all devices where EDDL is technically capable of delivering complete device functionality, and to use a DTM or a snap-on application to handle only the exceptions. I make this recommendation because it is simpler to implement a single solution than a combined solution. EDDL is a single solution that will work for the vast majority (95%) of HART, Foundation fieldbus, and Profibus PA devices.

Tom's point for commissioning Foundation fieldbus devices contrasts installable programs versus data files:

Commissioning Foundation fieldbus devices on most control hosts require DD's [device descriptions]. Most control hosts have a set list of applications that are considered safe to install on the host engineering or operator station. Each DTM is an application, and the testing required to ensure hundreds, or potentially thousands of DTM's are compatible with a control host user interface is not practical. EDD's are files, not application programs. Therefore there is no program installation risk loading EDD's on a control host.

On data availability, Tom writes:

…EDDL is the path for data availability that originates from a device, or is going to a device. The OPC Foundation support for the enhanced EDDL will broaden the use of EDDL for applications such as ERP, maintenance management, and other applications.

For the display of data in field devices, Tom notes:

EDDL is supported in the host by DD services. DTM is supported in the host by a frame or FDT. For many applications and hosts either EDDL or DTM can be used for data display. For hosts that are not based on a windows operating system, EDDL will be used as DTM requires a windows operating system. EDDL has defined display objects such as charts, graphs, etc. DTM is more of a free form environment using a variety of programming languages.

The choice for the enabler technology to use is EDDL or a combination of EDDL and DTM. Tom lists some considerations for your discussion based on operating systems, operating system version management, functionality and complexity of the device and if a custom display needs to be created.

Tom sums all this up with the following recommendation:

The final recommendation is to use EDDL as the required standard since each device must have a DD. Allow the use of DTM's on an exception basis where the functionality is required, and EDDL cannot provide it. Make sure that all the functionality to replace a failed device, or place a new device in service is available in EDDL. This will simplify implementation and maintenance, mitigate operating system migration issues, and provide a lower risk more error free working environment.

Update: Welcome readers of Gary Mintchell's Feed Forward blog! Join the conversation and add your comments below or on Gary's post.

Tags: EDDL | FDT | DTM | HART communications | Foundation fieldbus | FF | Profibus | device description |

May 14, 2008 in Asset Optimization, in Enterprise Integration, in Foundation Fieldbus, in Interoperability, in Profibus, in Technologies | Comments (0)

While in Asia last week, I had the opportunity to catch a presentation by Bob Lenich, Director of Emerson's Data Management Services. With the announcement last year of Emerson's acquisition of Decision Management International and the Compliance Suite manufacturing execution system software, Bob has been busy integrating the organizations.

The Compliance Suite software is being used by many process manufacturers, especially in highly regulated industries such as Life Sciences—Pharmaceutical and Biotech manufacturers. The starting point for applying manufacturing execution system software is the data model defined by the ISA-95 (S95) standard. The S95 standard describes the architecture of information flow between the plant floor, the automation system, the manufacturing execution level and the enterprise resource planning levels. Getting these workflow activities and the flow of information between them right is what defines highly efficient, customer-responsive manufacturers.

Bob described the place to start as understand the challenges of improving quality, improving throughput and/or increasing process availability/uptime as a few examples of what can drive process manufacturers to look at improving the flow of information around the organization. You have to understand the problems and needs in order to improve things.

As an example, in the area of quality, typical issues are to reduce deviations. These can be caused by ensuring the right material is available to add at the right time or eliminating manual error in calculations. Also, much time and effort currently spent just doing all the paperwork and paper work tracking required to meet today's regulatory needs. Converting from paper to paperless systems can eliminate all of these problems

In addition to eliminating problems, reducing these deviations also improves throughput by reducing batch variability, reducing batch cycle time and reducing the overall batch release time as there aren't as many problems to address.

Solving these problems requires addressing a mixture of automated and manual processes. Bob noted that the best way to address these issues should begin with a look at the current workflow, to understand where efficiencies can be gained.

The workflow should look at equipment, people, materials, documents and existing information to develop the business justifications and information architecture to address the areas of inefficiencies. Once a good benchmark is established, improvements can be made and the results quantified.

There many opportunities to do this and Compliance Suite is a great tool to use for enforcing these changes. Bob stressed that these changes are typically strategic in nature for the process manufacturer and require the upfront planning and design work to focus the efforts to the areas of greatest efficiency gains and continuing to prioritize the areas of improved data management and flow over time.

Tags: ISA-95 | s95 | manufacturing execution system | MES | manufactuting workflow | material management | batch cycle time | batch variability |

January 22, 2008 in Data Management, in Enterprise Integration, in Life Sciences | Comments (0)

I'm returning back to the U.S. from a week of meetings in Thailand. I'm struck by the sheer number of large greenfield projects being implemented and being planned across the Asia-Pacific region.

Over the past several years, Emerson project teams from this region have executed and are executing many of the mega-sized projects. Some examples from prior press releases include: Shanghai SECCO Petrochemical ethylene complex, Fujian LNG-import terminal, and Reliance Life Sciences therapeutic proteins manufacturing.

These projects are executed on a global scale with participation from project engineers from many countries in many world areas. Advances in communications and what can be done across the internet make global project collaboration and management possible.

While in other world areas we see a lot of experienced automation professionals retiring, in this world area a new generation of automation professionals is coming on the scene. They are learning the automation craft as these projects are executed and the new plants are operated.

Working on greenfield projects mean these new automation professionals get to use the lastest technologies like digital busses, controller-based advanced control, and enterprise connectivity to build plants that are more efficient than what is possible with prior technologies.

With my visit and new connections made, I hope to bring more stories of Emerson experts from this bustling region of the world.

Tags: greenfield project | automation projects | global project execution |

January 18, 2008 in Enterprise Integration, in Project Services | Comments (0)

I caught up the other day with Michael Barrett who manages some of Emerson's relationships with providers of production management software like OSIsoft.

Michael strongly believes that production management is a key success factors for process manufacturers competing in a global market. He defines production management as the area of management information systems that work with the planning and scheduling applications that drive the manufacturing operations in a Continuous Improvement Loop. This supports a company's Supply Chain Management by insuring the availability of right product at right time at the lowest cost.

As an example, Michael cites a refiner who imports heavy crudes. They may have several locations to decide where to process it. The refinery ultimately receiving this heavy crude must ensure that they have available tankage to receive the crude, processing capacity to run it and logistics capability to handle the products. They must also make sure they are receiving precisely the quantity for which they are being invoiced. One of the challenges is accurate measurement of water in the crude receipt. If a refinery needs to wait on a 2MM Barrel parcel to let it settle in a tank to accurately measure water--that takes time and at the current price of crude is huge investment tied up ($50/Bbl times 2MM = $100,000,000).

They also may have to consider the hydrogen and fuel requirements to keep the refinery in hydrogen and fuel balance. Doing monthly or even weekly mass balance on the refinery and the internal units does not generate enough visibility to maximize the operational efficiency for the refiner in a global market. To accomplish these objectives many sites are facing a measurement shortfall. An obvious example is the water in crude measurement. Typical errors here can translate into millions of dollars paid for water. Many refineries also have issues with high levels of unaccounted losses in the loss control reports. Top tier refineries maintain unaccounted losses to less than 0.5% on crude. That kind of performance is not possible if you only measure the loss once per month.

Companies are engineering new refineries today coming on-line in 5-7 years in parts of the world where the owners will own the crude feed. They are being designed with digital communications technologies in the processing equipment and systems to interact more tightly with the scheduling and planning systems to maximize and optimize these assets and the added value products coming from the crude.

Michael believes the challenge for existing refineries is to improve and integrate the production management systems to account accurately on a daily basis actual verses planned production. This allows the planning and scheduling departments to improve asset utilization and squeeze more efficiency from existing equipment. Production Management systems should provide key metrics for operations management to make decisions that maximize response to market demands, spot opportunities and operating flexibility to better differentiate themselves from their competitors. This agility coupled with improved asset utilization will help existing refiners better compete as the modern, high-tech refineries begin to come on-line.

Michael recommends beginning with a thorough analysis of the production management system as a first step. This can be the basis of building a business case for change to more agile production. Developing and providing decision alternatives with their business impact is an important part of this improvement plan. There is no one thing, but rather a combination of tools, work flow changes and operational discipline which can reveal the scale of performance improvements possible.

Tags: production management | management information systems | mass balance |

April 23, 2007 in Data Management, in Enterprise Integration | Comments (1)

As reported in my DeltaV News RSS feed, Emerson's Michalle Adkins and Dawn Marruchella have written a great piece in the AIChE's Chemical Engineering Progress Magazine entitled, Ask the Experts - Avoiding the Pains of Systems Integration.

In it, they recognize some of the issues process manufacturers have faced with manufacturing execution system (MES) integration projects and they share their expertise about how to reduce concerns about integrating existing batch process and achievable business benefits.

Their initial guidance is to analyze the integration needs and current business processes and develop a solution weighing the costs and risks against the sought benefits.

Functionality can overlap in both the MES and control system. If your control system has well integrated batch capabilities, Michalle and Dawn recommend using it to manage recipe execution and historical data collection around the batch. This reduces the complexity of the integration between the MES and control system and helps simplify the requirements for the MES. Then ease of MES and DCS integration and specifically capturing the information required for the electronic batch record would be the focus of the integration efforts.

Also, as mentioned in prior posts, they recommend that the solution have:

Support for web services, a service-oriented architecture, and the use of XML schemas, such as ISA-S95's business-to-manufacturing markup language (B2MML)…

Their final recommendation is to review successful implementations to understand not only the software and integration, but also the experience of the project team who implemented the solution.

The benefits for these efforts must accomplish the highly sought after business objectives. If these objectives are to reduce the cycle time for product release, you can incorporate much of the current after-the-fact documentation into the running batch process. Examples cited include:

• Manual setup, cleaning, and maintenance activities
• Review and approval processes for master and batch documents
• On-line data validity checks, electronic signatures, and completed calculations
• Exception-based reporting tailored for intended audience

By executing these tasks during the production of the batch, process manufacturers can increase their right-first-time metrics and shorten the post-batch approval cycle time. The article cites other achievable benefits based on the identified business objectives such as reducing deviations, significantly decreasing manual data entries, and eliminating paper log books.

Tags: manufacturing execution system | MES | system integration | ISA-95 | S95 | B2MML | cycle time |

March 23, 2007 in Data Management, in Enterprise Integration, in Life Sciences | Comments (0)

In an earlier post I discussed common transactions between enterprise, manufacturing execution, and control systems. At the heart of this exchange of information is Extensible Markup Language (XML) to pass types of data between systems in a standard, text-based way.

For instance, if you subscribe to this blog's RSS feed, it means you have an RSS reader which translates the XML data in the RSS feed and displays it in a readable format.

Another example is our Google search appliance that crawls the Emerson Process Management website to help you find things faster. The search results are in XML with eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to make the returned search results readable. Also, the latest version of Microsoft's Office (Office 2007) switched from saving data in a binary format to an XML format.

The uses for XML extend far beyond these examples and include the work being done with OPC Unified Architecture standard and many more.

I caught up with Dave Marschall who is an integration consultant in our Life Sciences industry center. He shared with me how he and his team were using the XSL/XSLT stylesheets in the process of creating custom electronic batch reports which contain information from the enterprise planning systems, manufacturing execution systems and control systems. XML is commonly used to store this batch report data from these various systems.

The XSL/XSLT stylesheets allowed the team to create different renditions or views of the same XML data. A production view might include process operations events and alarms, operator comments, equipment usage statistics etc. A quality assurance/quality control view might contain material usage, lot history, expirations, environmental data, laboratory data requests/results, etc.

Dave described a recent project where the addition of Quality Specifications data allowed the customer to add intelligence to these views of information. Instead of just displaying the data in a tabular format, the XSL/XLST stylesheets could perform comparisons between actual results versus the specifications, and change the color or highlighting of any discrepancies.

This change of colors was used to help the process manufacturer quickly scan dozens of pages of report data and identify areas of concern like out-of-spec conditions. The logic also triggered additional batch details where these abnormal conditions occurred to assist in the review process. The net effect of embedding this intelligence into the batch end report was quicker reviews of the batch which meant quicker release of the final product.

By using a text-based standard XML and XSL/XSLT approach, the solution can be well documented and more easily changed over time to meet the changing needs of the process manufacturer.

Update: Welcome readers of Gary Mintchell's Feed forward blog! Also, it was interesting timing to get a ControlGlobal.com email this morning discussing The ABCs of XML, Parts 1, 2 & 3.

Tags: XML | XSL | XSLT | manufacturing execution system | electronic batch record | production reports | quality reports | batch analysis |

February 26, 2007 in Enterprise Integration, in Life Sciences | Comments (7)

Manufacturers increasingly look to optimize their businesses by integrating their business processes with their manufacturing processes. ANSI/ISA-95 (S95) is an international standard for developing an automated interface between enterprise and control systems.

Over the last several years our Life Sciences Industry Center has been working with pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers on this optimization process in pursuit of operational excellence. I caught up with integration consultant, Dick Seemann, who discussed some commonalities he sees in integration transactions between enterprise planning systems like SAP business software, manufacturing execution system (MES) software and control systems like the DeltaV system.

A key transaction is the process order download which comes from the planning and scheduling software to the manufacturing system in the form of a request for a campaign of process orders or a single process order. The transaction contains a process order number, material components, equipment requirements, and specific parameters that are exchanged through standard web services. The team typically uses Compliance Suite as the MES software between the SAP software and the DeltaV system.

The MES software combines this information from the production, material management, and quality management software and then manages the order execution, performs weigh and dispense, and executes the manual work instructions in conjunction with the automated control system tasks. A complete electronic batch record is maintained at MES level, since it combines recorded manual processes and procedures with electronic information at the control system and enterprise planning system levels. Alarms, events, operation actions, and batch history are passed as transactions from the control system to the MES.

The process orders as the campaigns are being executed provide status transactions back to the planning systems on status changes during execution and upon completion of the process order. Materials consumed during the production and recorded by the manufacturing execution system are passed back as transactions to the material management module to accurately reflect what is available for planning future production.

Start and end times for each of the steps in the batch are also passed back as transactions to the planning systems to provide and accurate picture of equipment utilization and how long production steps take compared to standard times.

Dick notes that all process manufacturers have different business processes and that there are many more transactions that can occur between the three levels. As these paper-based processes are moved into an integrated, transactional world, end-to-end cycle times are reduced resulting in greater manufacturing efficiency.

Transcription errors are also reduced when all communications is electronic-based versus the paper batch sheets. Also, troubleshooting problems becomes easier when a history of electronic batch records is available to review to analyze where inefficiencies have begun to occur.

Tags: ISA-95 | S95 | MES | manufacturing execution systems | electronic batch records | equipment utilization | pharmaceutical | biotech |

February 16, 2007 in Data Management, in Enterprise Integration | Comments (2) | Trackback (0)