Merck taps DeltaV Mobile platform for on-the-go intelligence
A global leader in developing medicines and vaccines for various health conditions, Merck’s end-to-end integrated manufacturing process teams (IPTs) have turned to Emerson to ensure the company has visibility into operations from virtually anywhere.
In 2017, Merck started to adopt Emerson’s DeltaV Mobile platform, a mobile application for iOS and Android devices that brings operations data to mobile devices, including notifications for critical alarms to quickly communicate with IPTs to resolve issues.
Since then, Merck has implemented DeltaV Mobile at 15 sites, enabling the drugmaker’s operators, supervisors and automation engineers to cover multiple factories even when off premises. Because Merck’s operating discipline encourages key personnel to be “on the plant floor” when in the facility instead of in a control room, IPTs needed a tool on the floor or in the field to maintain high visibility of operations.
With DeltaV Mobile, Merck’s on-call personnel have a cost-effective tool for more than 100 operators who monitor critical process values, key performance indicators, or alarms from their mobile devices with intuitive, easy-to-read visualizations of the data. Users view real-time process data and historical trends, and receive alarm notifications so they can quickly communicate issues and troubleshoot with operators as well as remote experts.
Colleen Frank, director of the Process Control Product Team at Merck, currently leads the global team supporting more than 50 DeltaV systems at 15 company sites.
“The automation directors across each one of these sites are responsible for multiple buildings with leads within each,” Frank said in a user case study presented during Emerson Exchange 2025, held May 19-22 in San Antonio, Texas. “DeltaV Mobile enables Merck to get better business results, streamlining workflows with alarms and notifications. It really promotes best practices across the production sites.”
“Our job is also to make sure that things get adopted; that if we’re buying a product we see that it’s used,” Frank said. “We are requiring the people that have licenses to use them.”
Merck recently established Process Control Product Teams to “get them synchronized, enabled and empowered so that we’re using these assets to the maximum extent possible,” Frank said. The company’s DeltaV Mobile-equipped sites include the U.S., Ireland, Switzerland, and Singapore — which she called some of Merck’s newest facilities producing some of its most important products.
Sites are “running 24/7, staffing is becoming tighter and tighter, and we’re trying to centralize more — which is a good thing — and therefore we need this type of disseminated notifications,” Frank added. “The responsiveness definitely has improved with DeltaV Mobile, according to the surveys that we’ve done.”
More meaningful notifications
Merck’s adoption of DeltaV Mobile replaced pagers and other notification methods, which Frank recalled had a lot of limitations including nuisance alarms. She said DeltaV Mobile had many valuable features that “made it a more comprehensive package than just a paging application.”
Anna Moorman, product marketing manager at Emerson, said DeltaV Mobile consolidates and simplifies data to provide better awareness of the overall production environment. Operations are on demand with mobile views or tablets providing a “rich contextualization” of data to enable faster response and streamline workflows, she added.
“You have the flexibility to take your phone with you outside of the control room, or even if you don’t have a control room, to take it off site,” Moorman said. “It’s built for cybersecurity because it’s read-only so you’re not writing back into the control and not changing the setpoints or anything like that.”
The DeltaV Mobile App connects to the DeltaV Mobile Server to view real-time process values and alarms. DeltaV Mobile users can easily and securely access their data on-premise with Wi-Fi or off-premise with VPN. Whitelisting and data encryption provide further layers of network security.
“Merck takes cybersecurity extremely seriously and there’s a lot of checks that we have to go through,” Frank said.
