Attendance Down, Activity Up at Emerson Users Event
Major product announcements and discussion of numerous real-world industrial wireless applications were among items filling the agenda at Emerson Process Management’s recent Global Users Exchange.
Not surprisingly, attendance was down somewhat at the annual Global Users Exchange of Emerson Process Management (www.emersonprocess.com) held in Orlando Sept. 28-Oct. 1. The atmosphere was anything but down, however, as the process automation supplier made several significant product announcements and attendees made ample use of the Twitter social networking application. Indeed, “tweets” were flying prolifically from Blackberries to iPhones and back during the week.
Executives explained that Emerson maintained research and development spending during the downturn, and one result was the launch of a new DeltaV distributed control system (DCS) platform. Emerson used ideas of “human-centered design” as the model for developing new products. In fact, it announced the formation of the Human Centered Design Institute. The announcement culminates more than five years of customer work-practice analysis, new product development re-engineering and organizational training. The stated goal: “Make products that are not only reliable, compatible and cost-effective, but also bring about a significant improvement in ease-of-use and workforce productivity.”
“Process control technologies have come a long way in the past 40 years,” said Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer at Emerson. “But the industry has invested almost exclusively on feature and technology enhancement, instead of designing around how people actually use the technology. We believe it’s time technology began serving people, instead of the other way around.”
Premature locks
The ideas came together in the development of the DeltaV S-series digital automation system. “We observed that customer project engineering and design processes across the industry put too much emphasis on locking down designs very early in the project, often before the process design was complete,” noted Zornio. “Not only does this increase FEED (front end engineering design) and detailed design cost and time, it also exposes the project to increased labor and potentially significant change order costs during construction. Additionally, the existing wiring processes were time consuming and laborious…and ripe for an innovative approach.”
Sporting a new logo, the S-series DeltaV features “I/O on demand” and electronic marshalling. With I/O on demand, users decide what type of input/output (I/O) configuration they want, whether wireless, Foundation Fieldbus, Hart, analog input, analog output, digital input, digital output, thermocouple or resistance temperature detector (RTD). They decide when they want the I/O, whether for late project changes, during start-up, during operation, or temporary installations; and where they want the I/O, whether in a rack room, remote locations, hazardous areas, safety systems or harsh environments...
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