Yokogawa has launched new website to cater the customer challenges and highlight industry solutions. Yokogawa states that companies need the right industry-specific solutions to deal with ever more critical and complex challenges at each layer of their business. Yokogawa has long experience in taking the customer perspective to understand and address the challenges that companies face. Industry-specific solutions based on Yokogawa’s high technology gives our customers a great competitive advantage.

Please click here to open the new website

Honeywell recently introduced its Connected OEM (original equipment manufacturer) offering, an Internet of Things (IoT) solution that allows OEMs and skid manufacturers to remotely monitor the health and condition of their installed base. Equipment such as compressors, furnaces, pumping stations, analyzer houses and skids at end-user locations around the world can be monitored through the offering.

Through a cloud-based central asset management system securely connected to equipment assets, OEMs can obtain a consolidated view of their global installed base through a customizable key performance indicator dashboard. Users can apply data analytics and tools to troubleshoot and fix equipment, predict failures, plan maintenance and make informed business decisions in areas such as R&D. This results in increased end user uptime through superior maintenance of equipment, leading to higher customer satisfaction. It also significantly reduces servicing costs for the OEM, who can address most issues remotely and cut down on time- and cost-intensive site visits.

Honeywell Connected OEM was developed in response to a longstanding issue facing OEMs: the inability to monitor the performance of their installed assets. Prolonged sub-optimal asset operation results in high operating expenses for end users, and OEMs with performance contracts are unable to guarantee or justify assets’ operating outcomes. In addition, OEM service engineers must often rush to a site for unplanned maintenance and troubleshooting, incurring high travel costs if the assets are geographically dispersed. The net result is poor quality service and maintenance that can lead to the loss of repeat business for OEMs.

“Honeywell Connected OEM is a win-win because it solves an age-old challenge for OEMs while enabling them to leverage Industry 4.0 technology to optimize their operations and equipment performance,” said Andrew Brodie, general manager, Modular Control Systems & OEM Breakthrough Initiative, Honeywell Process Solutions. “Furthermore, it’s a timely response to market demand for solutions that ensure the continuity of production and services.”

Increasing asset intelligence provides the building blocks for improved equipment performance and reliability. Honeywell’s Connected OEM delivers edge data collection and application specific analytics which provides OEMs and their customers new operational insights. Through the Connected OEM solution, Honeywell also enables equipment suppliers to remotely monitor their assets and offer proactive and predictive reliability services.

Honeywell Connected OEM is ideal for small to medium-sized OEMs and skid manufacturers, including those without in-house automation teams, who require an easy-to-implement, all-in-one IoT solution.

Free Safety ROI Tool from Rockwell Automation quantifies savings and productivity gains to help cost-justify safety investments.

MILWAUKEE, Dec. 19, 2011 — Engineers, plant managers and environmental health and safety (EH&S) professionals now have a tool to calculate the potential annual return they’ll receive if they invest in an integrated safety automation system. Rockwell Automation developed the free Safety Return on Investment (ROI) Tool with J.B. Titus, a machine safety consultant and owner of J.B. Titus & Associates.

The new Web-based tool, launched on Nov. 14 at the annual Rockwell Automation Safety Automation Forum, addresses manufacturers’ need for a tool to help quantify potential savings and productivity gains from new investments in safety.

“An upfront investment in safety programs and safeguarding systems can help significantly reduce the financial and employee impact of incidents in a manufacturing facility,” said Mark Eitzman, safety market development manager, Rockwell Automation. “Still, engineers, plant managers and EH&S professionals have struggled to accurately cost-justify investments in safety. With the new Safety ROI Tool, they can calculate the costs of an incident and see the financial benefits of implementing a proactive safety program.”

At its core, the Safety ROI Tool relies on a basic calculation: benefits divided by costs equals ROI. To help simplify the previously complicated process of assessing those costs and benefits, the tool combines injury and productivity data and collects input from users in five categories:

• Estimated project amount, i.e., cost of controls, software, installation and training.

• Overall equipment effectiveness, based on increases in machine availability because of reduced unscheduled downtime and increases in manufacturing output.

• Increased capital-asset depreciation.

• Direct injury costs, such as medical expenses, wages and worker’s compensation costs.

• Indirect injury costs, e.g., regulatory noncompliance fines and repair costs.

The latest release of the PlantPAx process automation system from Rockwell Automation allows companies across multiple industries to improve operator effectiveness with automated procedures, enhanced visualization and new skid-integration capabilities.

The system’s new sequencer tool enables companies to easily automate process procedures, perform system modifications, and sequence actions directly through human-machine interface (HMI) faceplates. If a process change is necessary or an abnormal event occurs, a user with the appropriate login privileges can modify the sequence directly from the HMI screen, rather than waiting for a control system expert to modify the procedure code.

“The new PlantPAx sequencer tool eliminates the need for custom-coded configurations to automate procedures for continuous processes,” explained Jason Wright, PlantPAx product manager, Rockwell Automation. “It’s intuitive, user-friendly interface helps operators see and understand the information they need, and makes procedures repeatable and easier to track.”

The PlantPAx system further extends operator effectiveness with a comprehensive HMI toolkit for effective display design and enhanced standards-based alarming. This allows the operator to focus directly on the process itself, reducing system downtime and incidents. The latest PlantPAx system also features an enhanced independent workstation (or network station) that offers companies more flexibility in plant design – especially when integrating best-of-breed skids into multiple plants worldwide.

“There is an industry trend to leverage process skids for quicker line and plant expansion to help reduce time-to-market,” Wright said. “However, integrating these process skids into a traditional distributed control system (DCS) can create complexities and increase costs. In fact, for a traditional DCS, integration accounts for 50 to 60 percent of the project costs for end users.”

For example, skid integration often requires custom data-mapping or duplicated code on the DCS. This is not the case with the PlantPAx system – the skid-based controller can be added as a native controller to the system. Enhanced independent workstation capabilities help reduce the cost of integration by allowing the skid to share common infrastructure resources, such as user accounts and security settings, without losing application independence. This allows companies to leverage the specific application expertise of multiple skid vendors while providing a consistent operator experience.