Emerson's responded a couple of years ago with its Human Centered Design initiative one part of which is that all products must pass a usability review before release. Another response to complexity was a device product called CHARMs that feature I/O on demand and enable electronic marshaling.

Customer Bryan Beyer, acid operations manager for Southern States Chemical, discussed how using CHARMs in his new greenfield sulphuric acid plant saved the company time and money in completing the project. He noted it achieved several results including reliability, smooth technology integration, easy to understand system for employees, smooth I/O configuration, simplified troubleshooting, wiring cost reduced by 50%, quicker and cheaper I/O additions (use of Ethernet was a plus here), and a wealth of production data now available from the system.

A side note from a personal observation of the week so far--outside of a private conversation I had with Walt Boyes and Jose Gutierrez about the status of the ISA100 committee on wireless there was no other conversation at all during the entire conference about those standards issues. Only that there were products and applications working in industry.