Drive for Consistency

Emerson’s global center of project excellence is their Project Management Office (PMO) headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, with initiative leaders located regionally. The PMO leadership provides the business practice and management infrastructure that bears on every automation project in terms of processes, procedures, standards, resources, resource coordination, communications, training, budgets, benchmarks, timing, results, client satisfaction, R&D, and studies. Hundreds of automation projects are typically active across the globe at any one time, making the PMO a vital strategic asset. Emerson believes that no other company in the automation and controls systems integration field offers this level of commitment to automation design and engineering, and project implementation activities. The talent within the Project Management Office includes senior engineers and experienced managers within Emerson.

A particularly important task of the Project Management Office is minimizing variations in the execution of projects by its project managers and engineering teams through the development and global application of standard execution processes, procedures, project tools and ongoing training requirements.

Feedback mechanisms, Subject Matter Experts, operations management and quality managers within Emerson’s engineering centers around the world help assure that the capabilities and procedures of project managers and project engineering teams are consistently applied globally, especially with regard to reducing project risk for their clients.

The Project Management Office is sponsored by President Melissa Herkt and managed by Vice President Roger Freeman, who is supported by fifteen senior engineers and managers dedicated full time to various initiatives, including document management, project controls, proposals, estimating, process improvement tools, technology, education and training, and the like. In addition, there are almost 50 business specialists who support the development of project tools and processes, as well as providing technical support to project teams in the application of the PMO processes and tools.

Intra-project and international collaboration processes and tools used on projects enable the simultaneous execution of projects by the best available, cost competitive global technical resource regardless of physical location. Project collaboration is accomplished through a combination of software, communications infrastructure and PMO processes. In addition to the collaboration software, Emerson has implemented a global communications infrastructure in the European World Area that enables seamless and transparent communications and flow of project designs to resources globally. Called Remote Virtual Office, the infrastructure includes VOIP phone communications, dedicated engineering LANs/WANs in each office, remote desktop access to process automation designs, IP printing, shared message boards, video conferencing and file sharing. The Remote Virtual Office communications infrastructure and functionality is currently being implemented in North America and targeted for implementation in Asia Pacific in 2009.