Emerson Exchange 2014 Boasts Record Attendance, Focuses on Reliability

Overview

It's hard to find a larger or more content-filled user group meeting that is totally focused on process automation than the Emerson Global Users Exchange. This year's week-long meeting at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center in Orlando attracted record attendance of over of 3,500 people. The meeting content spanned the entire spectrum of process automation, from sensors and equipment reliability to process control, safety, operations management, project execution, advanced control, and more.

ARC Advisory Group sent three analysts to cover the event this year. The Exchange is not an Emerson corporate event, but very clearly a customer-focused and customer-organized event controlled by the Emerson Global Users Exchange Board of Directors. This includes representatives from across the process industries. The event also provides an excellent platform for learning about product and system roadmaps, about which the company has always been refreshingly forthcoming; providing clear future direction for just about all its major product offerings. This report summarizes some of the key highlights from this year's event.

North American Oil & Gas Revolution Boosts Emerson Business Performance

The first day's press event featured a keynote by Steve Sonnenberg, Emerson EVP and Emerson Process Management Business Leader. Mr. Sonnenberg touched on some of the key growth areas for the company. Emerson Process Management is doing particularly well in North America. With orders in the region up 12 percent over last year, the company is treating North America like an emerging market and has added a total of 3,500 new employees in the past year, mostly due to the surge in activity from the oil & gas business. The growth in the upstream and midstream sector also creates growth in the downstream sector as the industry takes advantage of increased feedstock supplies and lower energy costs.

According to Sonnenberg, automation end users today face three primary challenges: project risk, reliability and uptime, and the skills shortage. Emerson is taking steps to address all three challenges, both organically and through acquisition.

Emerson made several recent acquisitions to be able to adapt to this growth. These include Virgo Valves and Controls; safety equipment supplier, Enardo; and Peruvian automation solutions supplier, VAMSAC. Emerson acquired reliability services company, MRG, in May of 2014, which will be the focus of the company's new overall strategy to be a reliability-focused company.

Emerson's Transformation to a Reliability Company

While Emerson Process has been a long time player in the asset management domain, the MRG acquisition adds asset reliability consulting expertise to compliment Emerson's portfolio of monitoring and predictive diagnostic technologies for asset management. The company publicly stated that it intends to invest more $104 million in this space over the next five years.

Reliability is very closely linked to plant safety, availability, and profitability. According to group vice president, Jim Nyquist, shutdowns and startups introduce additional risk. Unplanned downtime due to asset reliability impacts plant safety as well as availability, with as much as 5 percent of production capacity lost each year due to unplanned shutdowns. Of course, there is a straight line relationship between availability and profitability. In addition, properly planned and scheduled maintenance costs about half what it costs to repair a failed asset, savings that go directly to the bottom line. With the addition of MRG, Emerson can now deliver the deep expertise required to develop and sustain reliability improvements as well as the pervasive sensing to diagnose asset health.

Reliability in Action

To underscore its commitment to reliability, Emerson again held its "Reliability Program of the Year" competition in conjunction with the University of Tennessee Reliability & Maintainability Center to recognize leaders who best demonstrate effective use of reliability-based technologies. Candidate companies are judged on best-in-class reliability performance, integration of proactive maintenance practices, effective communication and KPI development, and usage of predictive technologies.

Conducted in manner similar to the NCAA basketball tournament in the US (informally referred to as "March Madness"), 84 initial competitors this year submitted extensive questionnaires regarding their reliability programs. A five-person judging panel, then selects eight programs as elite quarterfinalists who must then undergo an intensive one-day site audit. The panel then selects the "final four" who present their programs and results and, finally, the winner is announced.

LyondellBassell Channelview, TX plant was this year's winner. Here, according to Christopher Ryan, reliability engineering manager, reliability is a team function with operations, maintenance, and reliability all involved. LyondellBassell uses a variety of technologies and software to assess asset health. Root cause analysis is utilized to prevent repetition of undesirable events. Every failure is tracked in SAP CMMS. Meridium APM is employed to identify systemic problems. According to Mr. Ryan, Emerson's AMS Suite has been effective in improving preventive maintenance activities and calibration efficiencies (by approximately 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively).

Wireless Updates

Exchange included many sessions dedicated to wireless communication; its versatility, security features, reliability, best practices, and use in a variety of industries across a broad range of applications. One end-user customer in the refining industry revealed his operation has such confidence in its wireless device performance that they are ready to implement it for some less-critical control applications.

Emerson practiced its skills in listening to customers to develop new firmware for its smart wireless gateways to enhance the user experience, safety, and environmental performance. According to the company, streamlined network interface and security, and device configuration offers a consistent look and feel as well as simplified data presentation. NAMUR symbols and organized table views provide actionable information at a glance. Use of smart wireless 781 Field Link enables remote antenna location up to 200 meters as well as connection to hazardous areas where intrinsic safety protection is required.

PID Control for Wireless

Emerson announced that it had developed an augmented PID algorithm to handle the longer sample rates associated with wireless process variables. Standard PID works when the field data is sampled four times more often than the execution of the algorithm. However, to extend battery life, wireless transmitters are sampled far less frequently. PIDPlus, the new algorithm, has added signal conditioning to handle this longer sample time. Several technical sessions at the Emerson Exchange discussed the tests of PIDPlus in several wireless configurations as well as an MPC application with very positive results. As part of the announcement, Emerson indicated that it has donated the patent for PIDPlus to the FieldComm Group. ARC believes this type of technology will be critical as wireless sensing becomes more trusted and more widely adopted.

Predictive Analytics for Continuous Processes

Predictive analytics for process operations includes several statistical techniques such as modeling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events. The goal of the application in the process industries is to allow operations to recognize abnormal situations early enough to correct issues and avoid downtime, off-spec product, safety incidents and/or environmental violations. Emerson is currently on Version 2 of the company's Batch Analytics offering and has expanded upon the batch work by applying the technology in continuous control. Mark Nixon, Lead System Architect at Emerson, presented the work being done to apply analytics in a continuous process application. This technology is currently being tested in beta with promising results. Mr. Nixon gave an example in which the engineers expected an alert about 30 minutes in advance of an event, but the alert occurred nearly two hours in advance. ARC expects the application of this type of predictive analytics to significantly reduce incidents and unscheduled downtime, bringing significant value to owner-operators.

Innovation in Instrumentation

As a leader in instrumentation, Emerson continues to enhance its extensive instrumentation portfolio by leveraging human-centered design concepts. The highlights announced at Exchange include:

• New safety and diagnostic features in Rosemount 8700M magnetic flowmeters include all-welded sensor design, glass feed-throughs for signal transmission between electronics compartments, smart meter verification, and electrode coating detection
• Advanced software algorithms in Rosemount's 5402 two-wire non-contacting radar transmitters enable its use for level measurement applications in solids applications
• Also for measuring solids, the newly launched Rosemount 5708 series of level scanners for level, volume, and mass of bulk materials employs acoustic and 3D mapping technologies
• Addition of verification reflection function in Rosemount's 5300 series guided wave radar transmitters eliminates need for manual device integrity testing
• For remote valve emergency shutdown, Emerson Process Management released the Bettis EHO electro-hydraulic operator for applications in oil and gas service
• Enhanced TEC2 electronics in the company's model 500 electric actuator provides actuator status and diagnostic information to help avoid unscheduled shutdowns
• Modular design, improved diagnostics, and enhanced local operator interface in the company's Danalyzer 370XA attempts to simplify natural gas custody transfer measurement applications
• Enhancements to Micro Motion's model 5700 transmitter are intended to improve productivity by providing deeper measurement insight and more user-friendly operation

Conclusion

Large, content-packed user group meetings such as the Emerson Process Global Exchange help fill the void created by the virtual demise of large, industry-wide automation trade shows to enable end users to obtain the latest product and application knowledge, network, and share technology success stories.

ARC believes that Emerson Process does this as well as anyone else in this space and with the company's extremely wide range of product and service offerings and brands (DeltaV automation systems; Fisher valves; Rosemount pressure, level, flow and temperature instrumentation; MicroMotion Coriolis meters; Daniels flowmeters; Syncade software; AMS Suite; etc.) the Emerson Exchange exhibit floor often has much of the "feel" of an industry trade show (albeit in a single-vendor environment).

This broad product suite, plus its proven track record in field-based asset management solutions, should also position the company well to fulfill its vision of becoming a reliability-focused solution provider.

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Keywords: Emerson Process Management, Rosemount Measurement, MicroMotion, Reliability, MRG, Plant Asset Management, Process Control, Process Safety, Oil & Gas.