Innovation Marks Yokogawa Users Group

Summary

In September, ARC Advisory Group had the opportunity to attend the 2014 Users' Group for Yokogawa at which the company continued to showcase its technology and services innovations. The four-day event in Houston had 500 registrants from 160 companies and 10 countries outside North America. This represents a 40 percent increase in attendance over the prior event held in 2012. The energy level appeared high, with halls filled with engaged users and pertinent sessions focused on products and applications.

Key takeaways include:

• Yokogawa Corporation of America is growing and has taken the workforce challenge to heart
• CENTUM VP presentations highlighted enhanced operations, consolidated management, and smart I/O solutions.
• The company's Advanced Decision Support (ADS) solution can help address today's operator effectiveness issues
• The FAST/TOOLS software suite can provide an extremely capable remote operations platform

Yokogawa Executives Support America's Efforts

Satoru Kurosu, Director, Executive Vice President, Solutions Service Business Headquarters; President and CEO Yokogawa Electric Japan International, Pte., Ltd., indicated in his keynote presentation that Yokogawa views the Americas as a strategically important market. He stated that Yokogawa understands users' challenges and concerns and has a vision of establishing long-term relationships with its customers. In his talk, Mr. Kurosu explained that Yokogawa has the ability to deliver integrated solutions for both large and small scale applications and provide long-term support. To support this claim, Mr. Kurosu stated that Yokogawa's delivery organization consists of 1,000 consultants and 4,000 engineers in 38 centers worldwide with another 2,000 customer service engineers for support.

Mr. Kurosu also talked about how Yokogawa addresses users' major concerns for safety and security, availability, efficiency, and human reliability. For safety and security, the company offers safe operating consulting services, plus HSE and compliance management, management of change tracking, validation of safety system, and IT security consulting. To support high availability, the company provides secured remote O&M services, condition monitoring of critical assets, asset management, advanced analytics, and mode switch procedures management. For efficiency improvements to reduce OPEX, enhance productivity, improve energy usage, minimize GHG emissions, and monitor KPIs in real time, Yokogawa offers solutions and services such as opportunity identification service, real-time production management, energy optimization, total quality management, and advanced process control services. To improve human reliability, i.e. reduce human errors and overcome skill shortages, the company provides advanced decision support, OTS, control room consolidation, fault-tolerance and ergonomics control room design, and task, workflow management.

Yokogawa Corporation of America Is Growing

Yokogawa Corporation of America's CEO, Chet Mroz, addressed the state of the company. During his presentation, he announced that revenues have grown about 92 percent over the past five years, with Advanced Analytical Solutions growing the fastest. He also noted that the company plans to focus on the gas value chain; upstream, midstream, and LNG. The company's North American operations have grown to 1,000 employees, with manufacturing operations in Newnan, GA; software development in Dallas, TX; and subsea and project operations in Houston, TX.

Engaging with the Future Workforce

The company has also embraced the workforce challenge by engaging with the University of Houston, which has established a subsea engineering program. The program is part of a multi-university partnership to advance subsea engineering and research. More information about the university's program and partnerships can be found here. Yokogawa invited about 100 students from area colleges to attend the last day of the conference, where it awarded a handful of scholarships.

CENTUM VP Continues to Evolve

Enhancements in the last release of the CENTUM VP control system include Macroviewer, which the company described as an "operations dashboard." Other system enhancement include tools to support both proactive operations and scenario-based operations.

Yokogawa also discussed the N-I/O (Networked I/O), which appears to combine the software-configurable nature of some competitive offerings with the integrated signal conditioning of others. While company representatives did not release all the details, they did mention that the company expects to release the new hardware and supporting software around the end of the year. The first release will only be supported by CENTUM VP, with a safety version to be released next year.

Yokogawa also announced plans for a product called Application Design Suite (AD-Suite), which consolidates engineering activities through a single interface and database. The company expects that it will be released with the N-I/O hardware.

Yokogawa to Offer Independent Safety System

The company's ProSafe-RS safety system, initially designed to work with CENTUM VP, is used extensively throughout the world. At the user conference, Yokogawa previewed its new independent safety system that will work with any existing control system and has a separate operator and engineering station for managing the system. The target markets include users with obsolete systems and those looking to upgrade from basic systems and seeking compliance with the ANSI/ISA-84 standard.

A Solution for Safer, More Profitable Plants

Advanced Decision Support (ADS) is designed to address operator effectiveness issues. Yokogawa has packaged advanced operator graphics, alarm management, and procedural automation with consulting services to create a solution that allows users to manage abnormal situations better. According to the company, the solution helps customers improve uptime, improve quality, reduce transition times, reduce training needs, and avoid unsafe situations.

Anand Vennavelli of Fractionation Research, Inc. (FRI) shared his experiences with the solution. The experience at FRI also revealed deficiencies in the existing written procedures, which Dr. Vennavelli attributed to a degree of vagueness. Implementing the solution forces the users to address shortcomings, update, and subsequently improve their procedures. He also noted that this exercise helped determine the best procedure based on input from the operators. Through automation, the time to transition the unit between states was reduced through the ability to conduct activities in parallel and through consistent timing. Consistency also created a safer environment because it minimizes undue stress on the equipment.

More than Traditional SCADA

Labeling FAST/TOOLS as a "system of systems," Yokogawa's Ed Smyth highlighted the solution's capability to aggregate disparate systems into a single interface; including DCS, PLC, RTU, and other SCADA systems. He gave an example of an implementation that contained 1.2 million tags. In the latest release (Release 10), Yokogawa incorporated the ability to synchronize FAST/TOOLS with CENTUM systems, plus tighter integration with ProSafe-RS. Other recent features include bidirectional integration with OSIsoft's PI solution, multimode trend routing, alarm analysis, and HTML5 support.

Chevron's Graham Whyte gave a presentation highlighting Chevron's enterprise automation solution. For the project, Chevron used PLCs and CENTUM DCS on the rigs, but unified the tags within the FAST/TOOLS environment. By doing this, Chevron will have a homogeneous operator interface for both rig operations and shore operations. The project also emphasized the ability to import the CENTUM database into FAST/TOOLS for reduced engineering effort.

Conclusions

Yokogawa Corporation of America's focus on gas production, midstream, and LNG will prove fruitful. It has a solid product and services portfolio and should be able to compete with incumbents. North American investment in shale formations and ultimately in infrastructure will "feed" all suppliers for the foreseeable future.

The company's investment in education demonstrates leadership in finding solutions to the workforce dilemma. Engaging the new generation will promote industrial automation as a viable career choice. ARC has and will continue to highlight the need for both suppliers and end user companies to invest in young people to spark interest in automation. ARC's upcoming 2015 Industry Forum in Orlando, FL, Feb. 9-12 will include several participatory sessions on developing the future workforce.

With the pending introduction of N-I/O, Yokogawa will have capabilities that equal and could possibly offer even greater flexibility than some competitors' solutions. The combination of software-configurable I/O with optional signal conditioning allows common signals to be configured via software, but has the flexibility to add a small hardware module to extend signal ranges when required. This should reduce spare parts requirements, while maintaining a smaller cabinet footprint.

Advanced Decision Support is a timely solution targeted at the operator effectiveness, which is often just as crucial to plant safety as SIS because it helps plants avoid incidents, rather than just mitigate their impact. ARC believes this type of solution is an effective method to recapture the 3 to 8 percent productivity loss identified by the Abnormal Situation Management Consortium.

Finally, FAST/TOOLS is a serious contender in the SCADA arena as well as providing a solution for consolidating operator interfaces and aggregating data. It appears to be flexible, powerful, and not tied to a single operating system. ARC believes that FAST/TOOLS is a critical part of Yokogawa's gas value chain strategy and will be the key component to project wins in the upstream and midstream oil & gas markets.

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Keywords: Yokogawa Users Group, Smart I/O, ISA 106, Procedural Automation, ADS, Advanced Decision Support, Workforce, Subsea, SCADA, Safety Instrumented System (SIS).