Todd Stauffer, exida Director of Alarm Management Services is the recipient of the ISA Standards and Practices Department Award. This award is in recognition of outstanding contributions as working group chair in the development of ISA-TR 18.2.3, Basic Alarm Design, and for pioneering work in development of the technical reports for the first standard on alarm management.

Proactively maintaining electrical and automation control equipment has long been a time-consuming, manual task, as devices become more connected. The new diagnostic reliability service from Rockwell Automation helps manufacturers and industrial producers drive a streamlined maintenance strategy on these mission-critical, integrated equipment lines.

The solution deploys a layer of technology across plant devices and equipment to monitor and perform analysis, and create a continuous improvement approach to reliability maintenance, reducing operational risk. As part of the service, a Rockwell Automation domain service expert also closely tracks equipment performance to advise on reliability improvements to the production facility.

“Our customers have access to a huge amount of data within their assets, but they often struggle to turn data into useful operational intelligence,” said Ryan Williams, product manager, Rockwell Automation. “In the past, companies relied on maintenance personnel on-site to check the status of equipment in the field and then develop corrective action plans. Now, with the diagnostic reliability service, they can transform maintenance data into asset intelligence. This helps build a more Connected Enterprise, leveraging interconnected data systems and producing actionable information. Companies can better prioritize choices on maintenance and production, and do more with less.”

The solution automatically collects identity and health data from all networked devices on the production control network. The data is then modeled with asset management information to trigger events and send alerts to necessary personnel for proactive maintenance. With the service, Rockwell Automation asset reliability professionals assist users in applying the intelligence on their critical equipment to inform data-driven maintenance decisions and increase productivity.

Case in point: A major oil and gas company used the diagnostic reliability solution to help centralize information gathering and monitor hundreds of critical control assets across a California rural valley. The company also needed inventory of all the field devices in its process control network for a companywide cybersecurity policy. The automated identification and monitoring solution helped the company’s California business unit comply with the new corporate policy, reduce costs associated with field service manpower through proactive maintenance, and increase its daily oil production.

Through integrated, automated device identification and tracking, other customers using the diagnostic reliability service can realize approximately 70 percent reduction in manual data-collection time.

The diagnostic reliability offering is applicable to all manufacturers, with an industry emphasis including oil and gas, mining metals and cement, auto tire and rubber, and consumer packaged goods.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that Dave Emerson, director of the U.S. Development Center at Yokogawa Corporation of America, has been elevated to the distinguished membership grade of Fellow of the International Society of Automation (ISA), a leading, global, nonprofit organization that is setting the standard for automation. The award presentation was held on October 11, 2015.

Founded in 1945, the ISA is an organization that sets and advocates technology standards for the control industry to improve safety, efficiency, and profitability at manufacturing sites. An ISA fellowship recognizes qualified ISA members who have made exceptional engineering or scientific contributions to the automation profession. Based upon peer evaluation, it is the highest grade of ISA membership. The criteria for selection are demanding and only a few members are elected each year, making this grade a coveted honor. This year five people received this honor.

This acknowledgment of Mr. Emerson reflects the following major contributions he has made to the control industry:

At ISA, he was involved in standardizing the field data used in process automation and drawing up the specifications of the interface for exchanging this data. Specifically, he worked on the development of ISA-88 (international standard for batch process control) and ISA-95 (international standard for integrating management systems and production systems). In 2014, he was selected by CONTROL, a prestigious and influential industry magazine in the U.S., to enter the “Process Automation Hall of Fame.” For Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International, which is an organization for standardizing manufacturing execution systems (MES), he standardized a batch interface. For the OPC Foundation, which is a standardization consortium that develops and promotes communication interfaces, he drew up the specifications for the OPC interface.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the December 2 release of CENTUM VP® R6.02, a new version of the company's integrated production control system with enhanced functionality.

Ever since launching the CENTUM series 40 years ago, Yokogawa has continued to improve its flagship product. In keeping with Yokogawa's VigilantPlant® vision for the control business, the company has developed a number of new operation and monitoring functions for CENTUM VP, the latest generation in the CENTUM series, that will make it easier for operators to keep track of what is happening in a plant.

Oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other downstream facilities have numerous suppliers to choose from and must deal with considerable variability in the composition of the raw materials that they receive, necessitating a number of changes to their processes. Further changes are necessitated by aging facilities and the need to vary production volumes to meet fluctuating demand. To respond to these challenges and ensure the safe and efficient operation of plant facilities, operators must be able to quickly and thoroughly check many different kinds of data.

Enhancements:

• Real-time trend function for a clearer understanding of plant conditions
• Preventing alarms from being misplaced or overlooked during handovers
• Tight integration with ProSafe-RS R4.01