Emerson blazes trail in process control
Published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Sunday, April 14, 2002
By Gregory Cancelada
Copyright © 2002
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Two years ago, Mexican mining company Industrias Penoles had a problem with its magnesium oxide plant in northern Mexico: The operation was losing money.
The company considered shutting down the plant but decided instead to install Emerson's PlantWeb process control package. Penoles hoped that the top-of-the-line control system, which monitors and manages production, might make the operations more efficient.
Two years later, the plant is profitable because of PlantWeb's ability to increase production by cutting down on waste and improving efficiency, said Raul Jacobo, manager of industrial process control at Penoles in Mexico City.
The system cost about $1 million. "The cost savings were at least $238,000" over the first two years, Jacobo said.
This success and others are the reason Emerson's process control business has expanded while the overall market for such systems has experienced sluggish growth. Emerson would not disclose what sales were for PlantWeb packages.
"Clearly, Emerson has been outperforming the rest of the market. (Process control) has been a weak market, but Emerson has been the exception," said Kent Mortensen, an analyst with brokerage house Robert W. Baird of Milwaukee.
The successes also allowed Emerson, a Ferguson-based manufacturer of control systems, electronics and electrical products, to gain support steadily within the process control business.
Trade publication Control surveys 5,000 subscribers for its annual Readers' Choice Award. This year, Emerson's DeltaV, the software brains behind PlantWeb, won the process control system award. Last year, the company's process control product came in second, and five years ago, Emerson was fourth.
Process revolution
Process control systems are the computerized brains behind the manufacture of processed materials, such as refined oil products, chemicals, medicines, and some food and beverage products. Using measuring and control devices laid out throughout a plant, the system manages production.
Traditional field instruments are simple devices that tell the control system a single piece of data, such as pressure or temperature. Wires run back to a control room, where process control software makes decisions based on the flow of information. The downside was that the software was proprietary, meaning it was difficult to integrate field instruments or software offered by a competing firm.
The situation began to change 20 years ago, when companies started adding microprocessors to field instruments, which made them smart and able to collect a vast amount of information.
For example, a conventional gauge tells a control room only how much liquid is in a tank. But one with a microprocessor also can track temperature, pressure, how long the liquid was in the tank and when the liquid was replaced last.
Meanwhile, the process control industry began seeing that technology found in other industries, such as the wireless sector, offered off-the-shelf solutions to problems.
"Process control companies finally realized that outside technologies were better than they could develop themselves," said Stephen Walton, managing principal of process control consulting firm Walton Associates in Menlo Park, Calif.
But making the most of these advantages meant using open systems that threatened the exclusivity long found in the industry.
Another problem: developing the right software that could interpret and could respond to the flood of information coming into the control room.
Betting the farm
One impetus for developing PlantWeb was Emerson's underdog status 10 years ago in the process control business, said John Berra, an Emerson executive vice president. He also heads Emerson Process Management in Austin, Texas.
Back then, Emerson dominated the field instrument market. But rivals, such as Honeywell, ABB and Siemens, were the biggest players in the process control market, said Berra, a graduate of St. Louis University High School and Washington University. "So, we thought: 'How can we really change the game here? What sorts of technology can we take advantage of?" he said.
Though not yet named PlantWeb, the idea was proposed by Berra at an Emerson planning conference in 1994. It focused on developing a new software package that could wed smart field instruments with a new communication system called Fieldbus.
Betting on Fieldbus was a big gamble for Emerson, said Larry O'Brien, a research director at strategic planning and technology assessment firm ARC Advisory Group in Dedham, Mass. "Nobody was sure Fieldbus would take off," O'Brien said. But "John (Berra) said, 'Let's bet the farm on Fieldbus.' "
The result was PlantWeb, which gives plant operators and engineers more information about a plant than they had in the past.
"A lot of our customers were actually being asked to play chess blindfolded, and we've provided them with a little more visibility to the chessboard than they had before," Berra said.
Now, customers understand their production process better and thus operate closer to their output constraints and also have cut waste created by inefficiencies in processing, Berra said.
"A lot of companies don't realize they have that much waste" because of less precise instrument systems, O'Brien said. Process control systems, such as PlantWeb, allow them to get more out their assets, he said.
It was this precision that attracted Penoles. The mining company had a previous relationship with a rival process control manufacturer, but Jacobo said it went with Emerson because PlantWeb had superior capabilities, such as precisely monitoring and controlling the plant's chemical reactors.
At the same time, PlantWeb offers predictive maintenance, which means a company doesn't have to schedule maintenance. Smart instruments monitor not only the plant but also their effectiveness and whether the system needs repair or is close to failing.
PlantWeb also allows its smart field devices to communicate directly with engineers through e-mails or pagers when a problem exists, even if the engineers are in another part of the world.
"Over the last couple of years, Emerson's done extraordinarily well. They've had more key wins over the competition," said Matt Collins, an analyst at Edward Jones in Des Peres.
Shell recently announced that it would install PlantWeb in part of its oil refinery in Deer Park, Texas. Analysts call it a major coup for Emerson.
"To us (at ARC Advisory Group), that win was groundbreaking. It was really the first critical control project where Fieldbus is installed in a major way," O'Brien said.
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