How to run a plant when expertise is lost

All the big process control companies are aware of the outsourcing trend, and are gearing up to provide services ranging from design to installation to operations to maintenance. John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management, agrees that Emerson is capable of doing everything in a plant, including running it. &ldquoWe have no plans to offer such a service,&rdquo says Berra, &ldquoand I doubt that any company would want us to actually run their plant.&rdquo

Nevertheless, the vendors are developing new hardware and software that gives them the capability to take over more and more responsibilities, such as automated monitoring, documentation, tuning, diagnostics and so on.

&ldquoAdvanced diagnostic capabilities, such as our Loop Scout /Alarm Scout Service, enable the Experion control system to quickly identify and isolate problem areas in the large sea of control loop and alarm performance data,&rdquo says Drexler. &ldquoThese services automate and optimize plant work process that would have required significant time and effort from expert personnel in the past.&rdquo

						VIBRATION ANALYZER IN A CAN
						Analysts who understand vibration data are leaving plants for greener pastures, and are not being replaced. Emerson&rsquos CSI 9210 machinery health analyzer diagnoses problems with rotating machinery and tells operators and maintenance exactly what is wrong and how long before the motor-pump fails completely. Source: Emerson

Emerson just announced its CSI 9210 machinery health transmitter (right), which automates rotating machine diagnostics. The system predicts when a motor-pump set needs maintenance. &ldquoAnalysts who know how to interpret vibration data are leaving the plants,&rdquo says Brian Humes, VP of Emerson. He says they are retiring or forming their own engineering companies, and the plants are not hiring anyone to take over the jobs. Their knowledge is not being passed on. &ldquoThe CSI 9210 performs the necessary analysis and identifies the problem, so maintenance can take care of it without an analyst.&rdquo

Unintended Consequences
No one can blame vendors for taking advantage of the opportunity. Plants are losing or divesting their control systems professionals for various reasons, some good, some bad. Sometimes the motivation is a clear attempt to shake up and modernize plant and organizational systems that are stuck in the mud. Sometimes the motivation is clearly to appease Wall Street analysts. Sometimes, the motivation is just plainly to provide more income for the top management of the company. Companies do what their management believes they have to do. And so we meet the law of unintended consequences.

In many cases, plants that divest themselves of engineers have nowhere else to turn for help but to their vendors. The vendors have the necessary expertise, experience, process knowledge and a staff of engineers. However, rumors persist that the vendors are stretched very thin these days, and are not keeping up.

Glenn Givens, a control systems specialist at Innovention Industries in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, certainly isn&rsquot impressed by vendor expertise. &ldquoIf you ask one of their technical people a question, they usually know less than I do and their answer is ‘I don't know, why don't you try it?&rsquo," says Givens. &ldquoWhen I find an important bug and I have hard data, they first say they're interested, and then nothing is done. I don't bother telling them any more. I see their controls expertise as ‘entry level&rsquo or perhaps slightly more advanced than the average instrument technician.&rdquo

The manager of the small specialty chemical company says help eventually comes. &ldquoWhen we scream for help, so far we have been able to get help from our engineering service,&rdquo he says. &ldquoBut it comes at a high price, and sometimes with a delay.&rdquo

To keep from getting overwhelmed by the increasing requirements of plants, the vendors are coming up with ways to simplify their lives.

&ldquoWe&rsquove systematically engineered complexity out of our systems, at times eliminating tasks that used to take up valuable engineering time, like configuring highway addresses,&rdquo says Robertson. &ldquoAdvanced control is now easy enough for the basic automation engineer and some configuration tasks can be accomplished by operators instead of engineers.&rdquo
Berra says they&rsquove seen this trend at Emerson. &ldquoAs our diagnostic tools do more of the low-level work, we&rsquove been moving up our engineers into more responsible jobs,&rdquo he says. &ldquoOur support engineers spend more time on bigger customer issues, and less time diagnosing equipment problems.&rdquo