Walt Boyes has more than 30 years of experience in sales, sales management, marketing, and product development in the automation industry both for sensors, devices and control systems for industrial and environmental controls, including Executive Committee and Board experience in several companies. Walt currently is serving as Editor-in-Chief of Spitzer & Boyes.
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While field device data, unified networks and effective visualization are powerful enabling technologies, plant optimization is more about the synergistic effects that the combination of the three can bring.
That's the collective opinion of three keynote presenters at the Rockwell Automation Process Solutions Users Group meeting this morning in Houston: Todd Lucey, general manager of Endress+Hauser USA; Barry Johnson, director of sales for Rockwell Automation's information software business; and Lisa Garrison, North American managing director of Acuite, an engineering consultancy focused on HMI development.
"Information in the field device is an enabling technology,” Lucey said. “Our Coriolis mass flowmeter, for example, provides over 100 variables, and those variables map to six basic buckets: process variables, safety, logistics, diagnostic information and asset lifecycle management, yield data and energy management, and quality and metrology data about the instrument." This digital data, however, is not always used to deliver value, Lucey said. "There are 37 million HART devices installed, yet on 80% of them we access no information other than the 4-20mA signal. But with that data, we know that we can reduce time to production and ensure and improve asset performance in operation."
"We were given a challenge by a customer in the front-end engineering design [FEED] stage of a project," Lucy explained. "They wanted to shorten the project cycle, reduce project costs and reduce risk. They said that their research showed that typical delivery times for flowmeters were about eight weeks, but with drawings, approvals, calibration testing, witnessed tests, and documentation delivery, the schedule would blow out to 27 to 30 weeks. We were able to leverage the instruments' digital data, and by being the main instrument vendor (MIV) were able to help bring the plant up one year early. That meant a huge cost savings."
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"How do we do that? We partnered with Thomas Enterprise Solutions to make device data available to any authorized subscriber,” Lucey said. “As the instrument configurator builds the model number, the configurator also builds 2D and 3D drawings automatically. We leveraged that data into Intergraph SmartPlant 3D, which produces the 3D drawings as part of the entire plant documentation and checks the data against the specifications. If the device meets spec, it is colored green; if not, red."