Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has announced today that subsidiary PT. Mitsubishi Electric Indonesia will establish a new factory automation (FA) center at its Jakarta office to provide enhanced services to locally operating manufacturers, especially Japanese automotive and component makers. The facility, scheduled to begin operating on June 3, will support the ongoing expansion of Mitsubishi Electric's FA business in Indonesia.

The Indonesia FA Center will provide technical consultation, training and support for FA products, including programmable logic controllers, human machine interfaces, inverters, servos and numerical control machining. Services will be available in Indonesian, English and Japanese for assured customer satisfaction.

Indonesia, which has a population of 240 million, boasts the largest economy in the ASEAN region. Major Japanese manufacturers of autos and auto parts are increasing local production capacity to capture greater market share in this fast-expanding economy.

"We aim to satisfy our customers' increasing demands for FA product support," said Takeshi Terada, President & CEO of PT Mitsubishi Electric Indonesia. "Our current structure of providing support through local distributors and our ASEAN FA center in Singapore has served us well, but our needs continue to grow. Our new Indonesia FA center will provide more timely product support and training in both Indonesian and English and, if required, in Japanese as well through Japanese engineers stationed at the center."

JGC Corporation recently announced that in partnership with KBR (USA), it has received a contract calling for FEED (Front End Engineering and Design) and early detailed engineering work for a large-scale LNG plant to be built in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The contract was awarded by Pacific Northwest LNG Ltd., a joint venture consisting of Malaysia's state-owned oil company Petronas (90%), and Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., Ltd. (JAPEX) (10%).

The lump-sum contract calls for FEED and early detailed engineering work for a two-train LNG plant with a yearly capacity of 12 million tons (6 million tons per train), and associated shipping facilities. The plant will be constructed on Lelu Island, Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and the FEED work is scheduled for completion by the end of 2014.

The purpose of this project is to process shale gas produced from British Columbia's North Montney region into LNG suitable for export. In addition to the two 6-million ton trains, the plant is scheduled to include associated utilities, storage, loading, ship berthing and personnel accommodation facilities. JGC will be undertaking the project as part of a joint venture led by American engineering company KBR.

Client Pacific Northwest LNG has awarded FEED contracts to several other groups besides the JGC/KBR join venture. When FEED work is complete at the end of 2014, the client will select the contractor of its preferred FEED package for receipt of the EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) portion of the project. The start of LNG production is schedule for the end of 2018.

As an ongoing effort to strengthen global customer support, Emerson Process Management has created a new Flow Lifecycle Care organization. Flow Lifecycle Care provides an extensive range of flow service capabilities for the entire range of Emerson flow technology to better respond to global customer requirements.

“The creation of Flow Lifecycle Care is a natural extension of Emerson’s commitment to expand global support and provide the highest level of flow measurement expertise expected from Emerson by our customers,” said Larry Flatt, group vice president of Emerson Process Management. “The importance of flow measurement, in virtually every industry and application around the world, warrants specific focus from Emerson to ensure we are actively helping customers maximize their investment.”

Customers must keep operations up and running reliably and many are under additional pressure to improve overall process efficiency and increase output. These demands are challenging to meet given staff downsizing, changing workforce demographics, budgetary constraints, and retiring technical expertise. With Flow Lifecycle Care, Emerson strives to bridge this gap with expert services and solutions that can aid customers in meeting their operational goals by maximizing the effectiveness of their flow technologies.

“By combining the service capabilities of Emerson’s flow technologies into one group, we intend to strengthen customer confidence in the form of less risk, increased reliability, and improved certainty in their flow applications,” said Scott Anderson, president of Emerson’s Flow Lifecycle Care.

Flow Lifecycle Care services are available around the world with 42 regional service centers and over 650 personnel. Plans are well underway to expand this network of support. The new organization will focus on flow service and support for Emerson’s Daniel Measurement and Control, METCO, Micro Motion, Regulator Technologies, Rosemount Flow, and Roxar technologies. By partnering with Emerson, customers can expect a comprehensive offering of flow services to include; installation, start up, repair, calibration, meter auditing, consulting, and education.

MatrikonOPC™ announced today that it has acquired OPC Unified Architecture (UA) Embedded Server Software Development Kit (SDK) technology from Embedded Labs Ltd., the world’s leading provider of the technology, and positions MatrikonOPC at the forefront of the emerging device-to-enterprise open data connectivity segment.

As the next generation of OPC, the powerful and flexible features of OPC UA provide control automation systems with open standard connectivity regardless of the operating system (OS) being used and for the first time, for low-level devices that do not even use an OS.

“This technology complements MatrikonOPC’s existing portfolio,” said Jeff Gould, general manager-MatrikonOPC. “Unified Architecture technology extends our data connectivity offerings from the desktop down to the micro-controller level.”