Emerson’s Global Users Exchange Conference Scene of Numerous Product Announcements

Being held in San Antonio, Texas on October 1 - 5, the Emerson Global Users Exchange Conference provides end users with a valuable exchange of information among process manufacturers, end-users and Emerson experts.  It also is an event whereby Emerson made numerous product announcements

Emerson Introduces Actionable Roadmap to Help Companies Overcome Biggest Barrier to Digital Transformation

Emerson announced a Digital Transformation Roadmap with consulting and implementation services to help companies develop and execute a tailored digital transformation plan to reach Top Quartile performance.

The manufacturing industry is focused on digital transformation, leveraging new technologies to boost operational performance.  But there’s no consensus on how to get there – or what success looks like.  With no industry standard, it’s hard for companies to know whether they are on the right track or when they’ve arrived.  Operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT) leaders are often siloed, not collaborating toward one central mission to achieve digital transformation.

Emerson Survey: 8 of 10 Lack Digital Transformation Roadmap

In an Emerson study of industry leaders responsible for digital transformation initiatives, merely 20 percent of respondents said they had a vision, plus a clear and actionable roadmap for digital transformation.  Additionally, 90 percent stated that having a clear roadmap was important, very important or extremely important.  Absence of a practical roadmap was also cited as the No. 1 barrier for digital transformation projects; cultural adoption and business value round out the top three barriers to progress.  While all respondents were actively conducting pilot projects, only 21 percent had moved beyond that stage into new operating standards.

Leveraging customer engagements with successful digital transformation programs, Emerson defined a structured, yet flexible approach to help customers focus on priority areas with a practical roadmap tailored to their business needs and readiness.  The goal is to help companies use technology to reach Top Quartile performance, measured by optimized production, improved reliability, enhanced safety and minimized energy usage.

Digital Roadmap Combines Technology with Industry Expertise

Emerson’s Digital Transformation Roadmap has two focus areas: business drivers and business enablers.  Business drivers look at capabilities and performance relative to industry benchmarks in key areas: production management, reliability and maintenance, safety and security, and/or energy and emissions.  The business enabler focus looks at capabilities in organizational effectiveness and systems and data integration.  For each, Emerson has identified detailed criteria to measure customer performance along the digital journey – from conventional to best-in-class to the highest level: digitally autonomous operations.

Companies can start the digital transformation journey wherever they are, from starting small in one facility to address key issues, such as pump health or personnel safety mustering; to exploring companywide programs across an entire business driver, such as reliability of critical assets; to driving enterprise-wide adoption of cloud-based technologies and analytics for overall business transformation.

Emerson’s Operational Certainty Consulting Group provides a host of services, from Digital Transformation Jumpstart workshops to deep-dive change management to deployment and adoption of new digitally enabled toolsets.  Customers partner with Emerson not only for its consulting expertise, but also to implement its Plantweb digital ecosystem, which offers a software, data analytics, and product technology and services portfolio to solve real-world problems while improving plant performance.

Emerson’s proven capability is bolstered by a global implementation team that includes more than 80 solutions architects and analytics integration engineers, backed by a project and service engineering workforce that exceeds 8,400.  Important foundations for digital transformation have been established with producers around the world. 

 

New Alliance Offering Creates Seamless, Scalable Digital Twin to Bridge Plant Design to Plant Operations

Emerson also announced the first offering to come from the 2018 alliance between Emerson and AspenTech -- a new integration technology that will make it more practical and efficient for organizations to create digital twins for use across an entire plant’s lifecycle.  With the new capabilities and expertise achieved through this joint development, process industry organizations can now use data from the standard digital twin created during plant design engineering to easily create a real-time digital twin for training operators and optimizing production.  This development helps lower two of the most significant barriers to digital twin utilization: total cost of ownership and maintainability.

Emerson is natively integrating its Mimic simulation software with Aspen HYSYS Simulation Software, widely used in project engineering.  Combining with Mimic adds real-time process optimization and training and makes building and maintaining an operations digital twin much easier for thousands of organizations already using AspenTech’s HYSYS software.

Digital twin technologies are a component of Emerson’s Plantweb digital ecosystem, a scalable portfolio of solutions that enable digital transformation, and are increasingly sought-after solutions for organizations looking to utilize energy and materials resources more efficiently to lower costs and increase output.

The Mimic HYSYS Link software includes automated configuration tools that enable bulk data transfer between Emerson and AspenTech systems, reducing integration time and engineering hours.  Built-in readiness for virtualization and cloud technologies in Mimic software help make it easier for users to maintain up-to-date engineering and training environments and avoid the large capital expense of creating duplicate physical hardware systems. Organizations can continuously update their digital twins for greater decision integrity and thereby use real-time dynamic models to test performance improvements safely in a cloud-based simulation before deploying at their actual plant.

One of the prime barriers to digital transformation—including adopting a digital twin—is how to scale the technologies for an operating unit, a site, and enterprises.  Mimic’s selective fidelity process modelling allows organizations to choose the design detail of their digital twin’s simulation scaled to their organization’s budget and potential return on investment.  Operations that have a foundation of HYSYS models can economically expand their model base to include more of the operation.

The simulation software works natively with Emerson’s DeltaV distributed control system or connects into third-party control systems, helping give organizations added efficiencies when using DeltaV or the ability to model different areas of their operations that may use different control systems using only one simulation interface. 

 

Emerson Launches New Location Awareness System to Protect Employees, Enhance Industrial Safety

Emerson announced the launch of Location Awareness, a new offering in its Plantweb digital ecosystem that advances industrial safety to protect employees at refineries, chemical plants and oil and gas platforms.  By leveraging the secure industrial wireless infrastructure, this personnel location system offers industrial companies an enhanced option to protect their most important asset – workers.

Emerson’s Location Awareness technology could help reduce more than 70 percent of common personnel-recordable incidents.  Used for safety mustering and man-down events, Location Awareness gives managers a snapshot of employee locations through rechargeable wearable tags.  In an emergency, when every second counts, managers can quickly account for employees’ locations in the plant or facility and act to ensure safety.

With scalable features, Emerson’s Location Awareness is one of the first personnel safety technology powered by the WirelessHART infrastructure.  It can be installed in just days, compared to weeks for existing systems, and can cost less than half of traditional, existing alternatives.

The Location Awareness system combines a new software application in Emerson’s Plantweb Insight suite with gateways, access points, location anchors and personnel tags certified for hazardous conditions.  The software includes: a safety-mustering feature that shows which employees have or have not checked in to their muster points during an emergency; man-down alerts that allow personnel in dangerous situations to initiate an alert for emergency response teams; and a geofencing feature that designates perimeters around areas and sends an alert if and when that perimeter is crossed.

 

Emerson’s Asset Performance Platform Now Connects to Enterprise Systems to Complete Automated Reliability Workflow

Emerson announced new connections for Plantweb Optics, the asset performance platform for the Plantweb digital ecosystem, that will help organizations take the next step in their digital transformation to a more efficient, reliable operation.  The latest release adds connectivity to computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) to create, prioritize, execute and track actions. It also includes a native historian for deeper analysis, and additional connectivity to plant floor data sources.

Effective predictive maintenance strategies demand that operations teams can efficiently respond to the most urgent issues in the plant.  By integrating with IBM Maximo and SAP CMMSs, Plantweb Optics becomes a single platform where personnel can see operational issues, collaborate on a solution, and manage maintenance response, parts ordering, scheduling, and work order execution – enabling a fully automated workflow loop for reliability from the prediction of problems to the execution of prescribed, preventative tasks to avert failure.

The native historian provides operators and reliability teams the ability to validate maintenance and operational response based on past asset behavior and assess future performance of the asset.  Now, coupled with the automated workflows to their CMMS, personnel can more efficiently respond to reliability issues that affect production and ensure critical issues don’t go unresolved.

Plantweb Optics is also expanding the supported asset classes by adding access to Plantweb Insight applications, another component of the Plantweb digital ecosystem.  The edge analytics provided on steam traps, pumps, and heat exchangers is channeled to the operations team, so they can determine effective strategies for these essential assets.

With this new release, Plantweb Optics expands its view of asset health -  connecting more applications to one centralized location for better insight into asset and plant health.  The asset performance platform helps customers improve reliability and promotes Operational Certainty, Emerson’s programmatic approach aimed at helping customers define and implement pragmatic strategies for improving performance.

 

Emerson’s Global Shipping Service Ensures Flexible, Timely Product Fulfillment

Emerson announced the new QuickShip fulfillment program offering customers a range of parts and product shipment service options to meet specific project requirements.  The new program leverages Emerson’s global production and shipping infrastructure to deliver a high level of dependability and responsiveness, making it easier to accommodate change orders, minimize downtime and improve project return on investment.

For turnaround projects, discovery and emergent work not initially included in the original scope of a project are often a leading cause of turnaround schedule and budget overruns, costing the process industries billions of dollars in lost profits each year.  Emerson’s QuickShip provides instant access to on-site operators 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week, for online chat, call and quick order processing to ensure on-time delivery when unanticipated problems require immediate attention, reducing the impact of late changes to project scope.

The QuickShip program offers three tiers of shipping services to meet specific needs:

• QuickShip Everyday provides fast, easy and reliable delivery of commonly-ordered items at no additional cost. Customers can select from an extensive list of available items through Emerson’s online store and receive immediate confirmations and shipping quotes within 24 hours.
• QuickShip Expedite leverages Emerson’s worldwide manufacturing resources to reduce production time and enable fast, flexible delivery for any of our products, from instruments to complex assemblies and other long-lead items.
• QuickShip Emergency enables the fastest order fulfillment shipment speed – typically same day or next day – of critical parts and products by connecting customers to Emerson representatives who can help identify correct parts, evaluate viable options, and process the order quickly through front-of-line factory assembly or Emerson’s dedicated local QuickShip fulfillment offices, enabling the item to be rushed directly to site.

 

 

Emerson Digitally Transforms Turnarounds to Seize $25 Billion Savings Opportunity for Customers

Emerson also introduced a new specialized framework of services and solutions for digitally transforming the way companies plan and execute turnarounds.  This new offering is enabled by Plantweb digital ecosystem and includes use of wireless sensing, location awareness, predictive diagnostics and data analytics combined with Emerson’s turnaround expertise and their proven 7-step turnaround process.  This new approach will provide scope assurance, schedule assurance and improved labor effectiveness while minimizing emergent and discovery work.  The result is reported to be reduced labor and materials costs of up to 10 percent and shortened schedules up to 6 percent.

Market research indicates that 60 percent of the turnaround cost comes from fixed process assets such as distillation columns, heat exchangers, piping, and structural supports.  Emerson is expanding its capability to provide predictive diagnostics, data analytics, and scope planning expertise to these critical assets.  Emerson’s comprehensive strategy is to leverage the investment in automation and analytics used to operate the plant to transform the planning and execution of turnarounds by combining this with deep industry expertise, proven work practices and broad portfolio of lifecycle services offerings.

On an average turnaround, these benefits could save $3.1 million in labor and materials and shorten the schedule by at least two days.  According to Emerson, these savings multiplied across an estimated 8,000 turnarounds performed annually could save customers as much as $25 billion per year in opportunity costs across all process industries worldwide.

Other elements of the new framework include:

• Scheduling early engagement with Emerson’s Operational Certainty Consulting and turnaround experts to perform a discovery workshop.
• Emerson performs walkdowns using a digital mobile app to digitize the installed base and provide a visual inspection of the asset with report and recommendations.
• Applying turnaround expertise to optimize budgets and scheduling based on existing resources and production requirements.
• Leveraging Emerson’s Location Awareness, a new personnel location system within the Plantweb digital ecosystem, to manage safety by reducing labor congestion and inefficiencies of not only employees, but also contractors and temporary workers onsite during turnarounds.
• The new Mobile Service and Command Center acts as a central point where all turnaround asset data is monitored and analyzed through Emerson’s experts. It also serves as an inventory warehouse stocked with parts.  For unplanned needs, it provides a direct factory link to expedite parts for shipping through the Emerson QuickShip program.