Gaily stepping into the future...

Zornio went on to describe Honeywell's coming attractions. He mixed new introductions, like the new, local version of Loop Scout, with announcements that included the tying of Profit Expert and Profit Stepper (the Multivariable loop tester) which will be available in early 2007. He talked about specific application support for the various vertical segments that Honeywell's strength resides in, such as pulp/paper, sheet plastics, and petrochem. He talked about a new laser caliper measurement system for the flat sheet industries, which is a noncontacting caliper that measures sheet surface regardless of irregularities. He talked about enhancements to Honeywell batch software (TPB6.0) aimed at the life sciences industries, including electronic signatures, parameter deviation, and oeprator command security, among other new features. Harking back to the four-quadrant X-logo, Zornio turned his attention to Asset Effectiveness. He noted that some of the most important features of the just released Asset Manager R310 include fault modules for many of the products supplied by PKS Advantage partners like Yokogawa, Krohne, and others, with multiple OPC server support and the ability to reuse fault models. AM also has, according to Zornio, enhanced I/O and User Interface capabilities. "Remember HFDCM? Well, we have, by popular demand reverted to Honeywell's time-honored three letter acronym naming convention, and HFDCM is now FDM, for field device manager." This drew a big laugh as Zornio showed Honeywell's new universal HART communicator, open DD based, and conforming to Hart Communications Foundation SDC 625. FDM works with any model Windows PocketPC, and permits universal HART device configuration. He reminded us that HART is by far the most common installed digital communications protocol, and that all the PKS Advantage partners support it, and that the FDM enables easy support of any PKS Advantage vendor's field devices. He went on to talk about IntelaTrac PKS, designed for the mobile plant worker to have access to many of the most important tools of the PKS system, and which, in the future will have fully integrated procedural operations support, wirelessly in the field. After all, what good is it if the DCS can tell you what to do next, if you aren't in the Control Room? DocuMint 2.1 will provide a common field calibration interface, including electrical assets interfaces. Zornio announced the inclusion of corrosion detection into the Experion system, through an alliance with InterCorr International's Corrosion Manager System. This permits, according to Zornio, realtime corrosion management within the Experion setting in R300.