FieldComm Group strives for transformation and preservation

FieldComm Group is the home of process automation standards. We’re solely focused on the global process automation industry. We’re growing every year and we’re working hand in hand with our partner members to develop, validate and maintain the technologies you’ve come to rely on—and bring them into the future as well.

Meanwhile, it’s critical that we consider the installed base of over 50 million field devices as we pursue the process industry’s digital transformation agenda. Nobody’s ripping out field devices to digitally transform their plants. Rather, FieldComm Group is preparing the new technologies that can bring higher performance to that massive installed base, to be complementary and backward compatible. The new field devices of today can communicate in much the same manner as that installed base, leveraging the same information models and crossing the integration chasm between the worlds of OT and IT.

FieldComm has also evolved its perspective on digitalization. We started out developing digital device protocols but have since extended our scope into common data standards such as FDI. FDI technology delivers instrument data to host systems, to cloud and mobile applications, in a common way. It configures and manages all those assets with the same package—regardless of supplier, regardless of protocol. It is truly the integration standard for our industry. PA-DIM takes that goal a step further, mapping all that data into a common format across all protocols, and all manufacturers in a machine-readable way so that advanced analytics can reveal insights across diverse fleets of instruments and assets.

A digital revolution is upon us, but we need a planned and stepwise way to proceed. We’ve evolved before, from pneumatics to electronics to hybrid analog/digital devices with the HART protocol. And now, we’re developing solutions for the future. We’ll continue to liberate HART data still stranded in existing devices, even as we transform it into PA-DIM’s standard information model. PA-DIM’s value has been widely recognized across industry and every day is being integrated into more and more solutions.

We’re also accelerating HART to 10-Mbps speed with Ethernet-APL. By combining the two, we have the performance needed to dramatically increase the value of field device data for the future while maintaining and leveraging the familiarity and interoperability that we’ve come to expect with HART. We’re also looking further into the future, toward new developments like field devices that don’t even need a protocol.

It’s truly an exciting time for the process automation industry, and at FieldComm Group we’re excited to help the supplier community bring more value and performance to the field devices the user community already owns—as well as the new ones they’ll rely on in the future.

Ted Masters
President & CEO
FieldComm Group