I walked into the demo room yesterday afternoon, and stopped dead. In front of me was Sue Lynch, business unit director for field instruments for Yokogawa. "Bet you didn't expect to see me here," she deadpanned. It is a compliment to the success of the PKS Advantage partner program that, first, Yokogawa joined it, and second, sent a reasonably high level official to do booth duty. We asked Jack Bolick at lunch about Yokogawa, and he said that he'd explained to Uchida-san, the CEO of Yokogawa,that there were more positives than negatives in this little practice of kaizen, and Uchida agreed. The advantage of being honest and direct strikes again.
Clearly based on the Rockwell Encompass program, Honeywell has made a real commitment to the PKS Advantage program. For example, they've integrated fault models on all the equipment made by Advantage partners into Asset Manager, a two way advantage for Honeywell and the partner together.
The combination of the Demo Room and the Demo Truck parked outside (where it is 110 in the shade) make clear that Honeywell is not just a DCS company anymore, in ways that even Emerson would be hard pressed to emulate. Lining the walls of the demo truck were biometric security tools integrated into PKS along with process control tools and MES tools. Same with the Demo Room. The range of solutions from perimeter security to IT security to process security, from process control to asset management, to MES was really rather breathtaking. If you needed any evidence that Honeywell is back, this would be it.
