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Highlights of the 2009Invensys North America Client Conference A Special Report from the Editors of Control

“Achieving sustainable performance,” began Steve Blair, president of Invensys Operations Management’s business in North America, “was chosen as the theme of this year’s conference be-cause the global economic climate demands a high pri-ority on sustaining the value of assets.” As Blair kicked

off the company’s North America Client Conference this week at the Hilton Americas hotel in Houston, he thanked the nearly 600 in attendance--a significant increase over last year.

Sustainability isn’t just about the environment; it’s about economic power, Blair stressed. “And to be

most effective, we need to actively seek out existing successes, repeat and enhance,” he explained. Companies need agility, and they need the ability to be productive while adapting to the new. “It’s not about delivering one goal, but about delivering consistent performance,” he added.

Blair highlighted a range of new Invensys technology offerings on display at the conference that are designed to do just that—ranging from new cybersecurity and control-in-the-field offerings to an immersive, three-dimensional, virtual reality simulator and the latest version of its Avantis.PRO enterprise asset man-agement software. This special report summarizes a series of ControlGlobal.com e-newsletters that offered highlights on these and other developments over the three days of the conference. Z

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Sustainable Performance Anchors Invensys Client Conference

The hurricanes that strike North and Central America each year are rightly known as one of the most powerful natural forces on Earth.

However, there are a few unassum-ing, but stalwart forces that may be even stronger. Chief among these is the unparalleled teamwork and devo-tion demonstrated by the engineers, technicians, operators and managers at ExxonMobil’s multi-unit chemical facility in Beaumont, Texas, as they worked to repair and rebuild from the devastation of Hurricane Ike’s almost direct hit at 12 midnight on Sept. 12, 2008.

In his keynote address to the Inven-sys North America Client Conference this week, Ken Anderson, ExxonMobil process control manager, described his colleagues’ amazingly fast, well-defined and efficient preparations for and re-covery from the third-most-destructive storm ever to hit the United States.

Anderson recalled that Ike was listed as a Category 2 storm, but its sustained 110-mph winds were just short of Category 3, and its storm surge coming off the Gulf of Mexico was in the Category 4 range. “Hurricane Ike’s 17-foot storm surge when it slammed directly into Galveston Island was still a 12-foot surge when it reached the Beaumont facility 35 miles inland,” said Anderson. “It was the first time I heard the National Weather Service tell people to escape a storm or face cer-tain death.” In total, Ike killed 195 people, including 112 in the United States. Thirty-four victims remain missing to this day.

The “dirty side” of the hurricane choked, halted and reversed the flow of the river bordering Beaumont’s 1960s-

vintage chemical units, and the 12-foot surge flooded them under 6 feet to 10 feet of saltwater for three or four days, destroying or damaging much of their infrastructure. These units normally manu-facture olefins, aromatics, paraxylene and specialty synthetics and catalysts. The site is the only one that makes some crucial components for Mobil 1 motor oil.

“Your plant is full.” ExxonMobil’s Ken Anderson related the inauspicious words from the ride-out crew that marked the start of a heroic effort to restore opera-tions at the company’s Beaumont, Texas, plant after its levees succumbed to Hur-ricane Ike. “The plant manager welcomed us, asked if we needed anything, and then said, ‘Well, I hope you brought it with you because we’ve lost it all,’ “ said Anderson. Beaumont’s staff had an earlier dry run when Hurricane Gustav missed them on Sept. 1, and then evacuated before Ike ar-rived. The storm surge overwhelmed the facility, floated railroad tanker cars off their tracks, and its outflow even gouged out a 30-foot to 40-foot deep crater in the levy barrier at the facility’s entry road. “The ride-out crew’s first communication to the plant manager the next day was, ‘Your plant is full.’ “

Even after the plant was pumped and dried out, the news was hardly better. The facility’s parking lots were buried in a deep layer of sea sand and shells, and its buildings, vehicles and banks of comput-ers, screens, cabinets and other equip-ment were already corroding after being immersed in the saltwater. “For example, the specialty chemical unit’s Foxboro, Triconex and PLC-based control system was a total loss,” says Anderson.

ExxonMobil, Invensys Team Up on Hurricane Ike Recovery

“Sustainable performance is achievable for those who lead. And we intend to lead.”Invensys Operations Management’s Steve Blair pledged the company’s commitment to helping its clients stay productive while enabling them to respond to evolving business, regulatory and societal demands.

Fortunately, if anything can be considered good fortune in such a situation, the response of ExxonMobil’s staff and its many partners was unprecedented, according to Anderson. “After the storm, we had several weeks and months of sunny weather, and this was key to getting the recovery done in record time,” says Anderson. “Starting the recovery was difficult. There was no power in the plant or city. There was no telephone service and only unreliable cell phone service. Also, the hotels, motels and restaurants were damaged or not open. And many of Beaumont’s staff were dealing with similar damage and disaster recovery in their own homes after working 14-16 hours per day on the plant’s recovery. Many homes were flooded or had missing roofs. There were a lot of damaged autos.”

ExxonMobil assembled a 35-person recovery team by

Sept. 17 and began working on about ten buildings. Their DCS and PLC cabinets were demolished, remediation and reconstruction projects were started, marshalling cabinets were replaced and a large amount of cable was stripped and reused. Staffed by ExxonMobil employees from many far-flung locations, the team split into two parts, one to secure supplies and resources, and the other to pump

out the plant. Other focus areas included control system recovery (CSR), power distribution, analyzers, mechanical execution and loop checking.

After the CSR team was assembled, Anderson says the group developed a CSR guiding principles document to help get all the team leaders and members on the same page. “This became a key reference document that helped us develop an execution strategy and schedule, which identified critical path work, and then established an action plan for each building,” he explains. The old Foxboro DCS employed a UNIX-based system, and it was replaced by a Microsoft Windows system.

“Invensys also helped us overcome many challenges during the recovery. Their tools worked well, and this spared us a lot of anxiety,” says Anderson. After demol-ishing the old specialty chemicals control room, Exx-onMobil built a temporary control room in a trailer and installed a new Foxboro DCS, Triconex devices, Allen-Bradley PLCs and other equipment.

“The key to our recovery’s success was establishing a clear chain of command and having clear criteria for decision-making,” adds Anderson. “We had unambigu-ous roles and responsibilities for creating the CSR team, and established it as the single point of contact with other recovery efforts. We also had inter-team loops with everyone’s contact information and did a lot of file sharing with flash drives. And, we specified boundaries for CSR’s work and asked each proposal that came in if it met the minimum requirement of being crucial for restoring pro-duction. If it didn’t, it would have to wait.

“We then identified a true schedule of critical activities and were able to cut our estimated six-to-nine month recov-ery down to about eight weeks,” Anderson says. “It also was vital to have direct contact with our vendor factories and leadership, and Invensys’ president for North America, Steve Blair, came out and visited with his team. He showed that Invensys really had our back and demonstrated a sincere commitment to working with us on our recovery.

“As a result, within in one month and one day of the flood, on Oct. 14, we were able to send the first success-ful DCS reading through the temporary specialty chemi-cals control room. That really helped morale in the plant. By Dec. 7 we were able to produce our first on-spec product thanks to our ExxonMobil recovery efforts and the help we got from Invensys too.” Z


“Your plant is full.” ExxonMobil’s Ken Anderson related the inauspicious words from the ride-out crew that marked the start of a heroic effort to restore operations at the company’s Beaumont, Texas, plant after its levees succumbed to Hurricane Ike.


The dust continues to settle on the recent reorga-nization of Wonderware and the former Invensys Process Systems brands into a single integrated entity called Invensys Operations Management. Today, at the company’s North America Client Con-ference, Rashesh Mody, vice president, portfolio and strategy, and Mark Davidson, vice president, global marketing, explained to a group of trade media

members and analysts how the newly integrated company’s vision and strategy continue to evolve.

“We have the connecting technologies that glue all these vectors together.” Invensys’ Rashesh Mody (foreground) and Mark Davidson explained how the company’s operations management vision can help advance clients’ pursuit of environmental, productivity, asset and control/safety excellence. The company’s vision centers on the ability to help its clients to optimize information flows, production

activities and, ultimately, operational profit, Davidson explained. And while optimization is the vision, the fundamentals of automation, instrumentation and controls are still very much front and center for the company. “We believe automation and controls are the foundation,” Davidson said. “If you don’t get those things right, you can’t do optimization.”

As Invensys Operations Management, the com-pany’s strategy and approach to execution are based on delivering platform, industry and business value, Davidson explained. A unified automation platform, which includes core control, visualization, engineer-ing and connectivity tools, is complemented by tightly coupled Invensys applications for functions such as recipe management, process optimization and simulation. The company is moving toward “a common platform from very small systems to the very large,” Davidson said.

Layered on these functional applications, in turn, are Invensys-built solutions, as well as partner-built solutions for specific industry and application needs. These applications are “loosely coupled, but tightly aligned” to the underlying architecture, Mody added. “This is where Invensys domain expertise and that of our partners comes into play.”

Mody and Davidson further explained that the company will focus on two key industry sectors: the process industries, including upstream oil and gas; hydrocarbon processing; power and energy; metals, minerals and mining; and pulp and paper; and hybrid industries, including food and beverage; specialty chemical; life science; and infrastructure, such as water/wastewater treatment. Hybrid industries, in particular, are a fertile ground for exploiting the capabilities of Invensys’ InFusion enterprise control system platform, Mody added. “Hybrid industries are our strongest, fastest growth area.” Z

“We have the connecting technologies that glue all these vectors together.” Invensys’ Rashesh Mody (foreground) and Mark David-son explained how the company’s operations management vision can help advance clients’ pursuit of environmental, productivity, asset and control/safety excellence.

Training, teamwork and procedures can make the possible seem miraculous. That was the message offered by Jeff Skiles, co-pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, which landed safely in the Hudson River after losing both its engines in an encounter with a flock of Canada geese at 3,200 ft. on Jan. 15. Skiles spoke at the open-ing session of the Invensys North America Client Conference this week in Houston.

“Faced with a challenging situation, several hundred people banded together and did their jobs,” said Skiles, who cited a lifetime of training and standardized procedures as additional keys to the successful landing on the Hudson. “It was a chain that led to salvation. Each person involved was a link in that chain. Not one link failed. It speaks to the incredible power of what people can accomplish when they work together to ac-complish a common goal. For me, that’s always going to be the real story of Flight 1549.”

The son of two pilots, Skiles said he’d decided on a career path at a young age. “I pumped gas to pay for my licenses and after earning a B.S. degree in geology, I got a job flying the mail,” he said.

“They sounded like hail hitting the airplane, and then both engines immediately rolled back to idle.” Jeff Skiles, co-pilot of US Airways flight 1549, described the plane’s encounter with a flock of Canada geese that three minutes later resulted in their dra-matic water landing in the Hudson River. Remarkably, Skiles had met the aircraft’s captain, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger for the first time at the beginning of their four-day tour of flights together. The flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte, N.C., was to be their final flight in the series.

“In our business, it’s our training and our adherence to pro-cedures that allows us to work as a team,” he explained. “Sully and I both have more than 20,000 flying hours. What allowed the two of us to do so well was our training, our teamwork and our procedures. As we accelerate down the runway, for example, we’re not allowed to engage in any extraneous con-versation below 10,000 ft.”

It was Skiles’ first time flying the Airbus A320 when he saw the line of geese and thought the aircraft would fly right over them. “They sounded like hail hitting the airplane, and then both engines immediately rolled back to idle,” he said. Sullen-berger, as the captain, then took over the airplane as it began

Teamwork, Procedures Enabled Miracle of Flight 1549

What “Operations Management” Means to Invensys

gliding without engines, trading air speed for altitude.Skiles, according to procedures, immediately

reached for his emergency checklist. “The air traf-fic controller was vectoring us back to the runway,” recalled Skiles. “I was resetting computers to provide information. These are computer-controlled engines, so you shut them down and restart them when they act up. To strike off across land, we’d have to be sure we could make it. Our only option was the Hudson. What I remember most about the descent is the noise. We have a large collection of alarms. It seems like every aural alert was going off at once.”

Sticking to their training and procedures helped Skiles and Sullenberger to focus, despite the onslaught of noise and alarming systems. “We had to start slowing the plane down,” he said. “We were gliding at 210 knots. At that speed the plane would break apart when it hit the water. We slowed down to about 140.”

Once they landed, the aircraft was evacuated in an orderly fashion. “We were throwing life vests out to the passengers on the wings,” he remembered. “The wings were slippery with jet fuel. The passen-gers were frequent flyers going home from work. They helped each other throughout the ordeal. Eight of them were so unfazed that when we got to a ferry terminal, they hailed a cab and got on the next flight to Charlotte.”

Accidents are almost always caused by a chain of smaller oversights, said Skiles. “When the birds flew into our aircraft, we were shocked, but we didn’t panic,” he recalled. “Our training helped us. Every member of the crew knew what to do. Today, a flight crew works more like a baseball team than like a traditional, top-down man-agement structure. Every member of our crew has to be able to communicate.”

Procedures were another big key that accounted for their success. “We call them ‘barriers to error,’” he explained. “Procedures allow employees to act inde-pendently from management. It enables and empowers employees.”

On Jan. 15, Flight 1549 had a lot of luck and a lot of help. “Everyone had an equally important role to play,” said Skiles. “We were nothing more than the techni-cians on-site, following the procedures and using the teamwork. Most pilots spend lifetimes preparing for an incident that never happens. I wasn’t scared because we knew what to do. We had a window to see out of. And we had a plan.” Z


“They sounded like hail hitting the airplane, and then both engines imme-diately rolled back to idle.” Jeff Skiles, co-pilot of US Airways flight 1549, described the plane’s encounter with a flock of Canada geese that three minutes later resulted in their dramatic water landing in the Hudson River.

To most process control operators and technicians, “Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals,” is more than an old lyric from The Who. It’s how many do their jobs, year in and year out, in a wide range of climates and in situations of varying difficulty and danger.

So saving a little precious time out there is good, and curing a few headaches is better. However, sav-ing a lot of time and preventing many headaches is a blessing.

To that end, Invensys Operations Management to-day unveiled new features of its I/A Series distributed control system (DCS) that enable faster deployment of block configuration, faster device commissioning and easy set-up of control in the field (CIF) loops. It demonstrated I/A Series’ new CIF capabilities on the second day of the company’s 2009 Invensys North America Client Conference this week in Houston.

“This is part of our three-part strategy to excel in Foundation fieldbus (FF),” said Charlie Piper, senior development program manager, Invensys Opera-tions Management. “We started by building a very robust foundation that made FF easy to use in 2004, added diagnostics functions in 2006, and now we’ve wrapped it up with CIF capabilities.”

“What used to be a five-day job can now be done in 15 minutes.” Invensys’ Charlie Piper demonstrated new I/A Series control system capabilities designed to make it easier to deploy and manage control algorithms in field devices. Invensys reported that it passed the requirements of the Fieldbus Foundation’s Host Interoperability Support Test in August, and then implemented many engineering and performance innovations that go beyond those requirements to help clients receive maximum benefit from their CIF deployment. As a result, Invensys’ latest fieldbus implementation is a high-availability platform solution offering exceptional fault tolerance, easy configura-

Better Fieldbus “Control in Field” Saves Time and Headaches

tion and superior device management. It supports use of standard, enhanced and custom fieldbus function block types to make full use of algorithm capabilities provided by device vendors. Configuring control algorithms directly into field devices improves loop performance by eliminat-ing transport time in data exchange between field devices and the host control system.

“We started with the system changes necessary to meet the basic Fieldbus Foundation standard, added tools and templates to automate and otherwise improve con-figurability, and then made numerous other innovations based on needs expressed by our clients, but not covered in the standard,” said Piper. “For example, downloads and device commissioning, loop building and function block scheduling, and setting up devices for backup link-active scheduling are easier and faster in our implementation. This eliminates the complexity that has been a barrier for many to making the most of CIF and FF.”

Users can employ I/A Series CIF to choose whether

they deploy function blocks in the field devices, DCS or both. This enables greater flexibility and efficiency in many control strategies. The Fieldbus Foundation’s host registra-tion program tests the host’s ability to support standard function blocks and features in Device Descriptions and Capabilities files. This ensures basic interoperability with all field devices. However, Invensys reports that it went further to make fieldbus simple to use and to give users added tools, templates and other innovations. These capa-bilities provide the following benefits:

Reduced engineering time via custom and generic engineering templates, which can be nested many levels deep. Function block flexibility may be contained in the device template, device- specific applications or in a func-tion block toolset for more generic mixing and matching.

Faster response to operator changes by caching all standard parameters in the I/A Series’ control processor. This gives instantaneous read access to DCS applications, such as HMIs or historians. Dynamic values are read into the processor every 10 seconds, with operator change commands written upon change. This minimizes the inherent delay caused by PID function blocks remote to the field devices.

Flexible mixing of control in the field or the host. Us-ers interact with a consistent set of standard or custom blocks, connecting output and inputs simply by dragging one to the other.

Easy Foundation fieldbus scheduling, including ability to set the segment macrocycle, optimize timing variables and minimize dead time in the loop.

Rapid device commissioning with a device preparation wizard that sets devices to the correct tag and address; fast, parallel database download into the blocks in the device; and a group mechanism that saves time in placing the blocks and loops on active control.

Improved asset reliability. When implemented with Invensys’ InFusion field device manager technology, I/A Series CIF becomes part of a common device configura-

tion, commissioning and maintenance environment that provides tools to better diagnose device problems for any device from any vendor that threaten plant uptime. InFu-sion is the first device management solution to integrate both device type managers (DTMs) that comply with the FDT standard for advanced maintenance diagnostics and the enhanced device descriptions that also comply with the electronic device description language (EDDL) stan-dard for device configuration.

“The main reason to use Foundation fieldbus is to do predictive maintenance in valves and other devices and be able to prevent unexpected shutdowns and improve asset reliability,” said Piper. “Once you implement FF, you can look at all your loops and decide on the number you want to put in the DCS and the number you want to put in the field. The more complex loops typically go in the DCS, but the one clear advantage of control in the field is that you can schedule the execution of the blocks in PID loops back-to-back. Consequently, you get to shorten the time between when the analog block begins to execute and when you get the analog output, such as when its valves begin to move. This can minimize dead time and enable better loop performance as the loops respond more quickly to measured changes.”

Piper added that the big change in I/A Series CIF is in how it engineers and deploys its software function blocks. Traditionally, function blocks could be drawn on screen as part of a loop diagram, but actual configuration still required a lot of manual configuration and programming of each device in the field. I/A Series CIF allows users to draw their diagram, but then hit a “deploy” button that sends the configuration order through the associated controllers and fieldbus interface-card modules to all the devices to configure them automatically and remotely. “The module detects that the tags on the devices specified are correct and then downloads to the software in those instruments,” explained Piper. “This turns what used to be a five-day job into one that can be done in 15 minutes.” Z


“What used to be a five-day job can now be done in 15 minutes.” Inven-sys’ Charlie Piper demonstrated new I/A Series control system capabilities designed to make it easier to deploy and manage control algorithms in field devices.


Armed with 3D glasses and a joystick, Marizio Rova-glio deftly maneuvered through the virtual process plant, closing valves, conjuring work orders and putting out simulated fires. Despite the hotel confer-ence room setting at this week’s Invensys Client Conference, it was easy to be transported by this immersive, game-style simulator that for the first time marries first-principle simulation with “augmented” reality to enable engineers and operators to see and safely interact with the plant and the processes they control.

Called EYEsim, the system extends the scope of traditional simulator training to include not only the control room, but the field as well, explains Rovaglio, Invensys Operations Management group leader for in-novation technologies and emerging services. Control room operators, as well as field operators and main-tenance technicians, can now be trained in tandem, interactively solving problems over walkie-talkie under trainer supervision, he explained.

“The increasing complexity of plants, combined with a changing workforce, demands next-generation tools that can safely and interactively train new opera-tors and engineers without putting them, the commu-nity or the environment at risk,” added Tobias Scheele, vice president, advanced applications, Invensys Operations Management. “This system provides a stable, realistic environment for practicing routine op-erational and maintenance functions, as well as rarely performed volatile tasks such as plant shutdowns. In addition, using computer models of real equipment allows endless experimentation without ever taking the equipment off- line, mitigating risk to production as well.”

Using and applying gaming and other skill sets most familiar to younger employees, the EYE-Sim solution also appeals to employees new to the engineering and plant workplace, as well as experienced engineers. It combines virtual reality technologies with high-fidelity process and control simulation, computer-based maintenance and docu-mentation management, and other applications to provide a highly realistic and safe training environ-

ment for improving operating efficiency and skills. Simulations are driven by the company’s DYNSIM high-fidelity process simulator, FSIM Plus software, I/A Series control system emula-tion and other compatible programs.

By merging virtual plant imagery with screens from asset management or other application software, the Invensys solution creates a com-puter-generated representation of either a real or proposed process plant. Using a stereoscopic headset, trainees enter a completely immersive environment in which they can move throughout the plant. Such freedom is possible because the virtual environment is rendered at 60 frames per second, significantly faster than can be achieved by traditional, non-real-time rendering.

EYESim technology is geared toward the energy, chemical, oil and gas, and other vital process indus-tries as they face knowledge management, training and retention challenges brought on by an aging and dwindling industry workforce.

“The loss of experienced workers and as-sociated knowledge is increasing the risk of conducting safe, reliable and efficient plant operations, but the EYESim solution creates an environment in which operators and engi-neers can quickly absorb and use the wealth of process data and control system information that is available to them,” said Tom Fiske, Ph.D. and senior analyst with ARC Advisory Group. “Traditional operator training simulators play a significant role in protecting knowledge assets, and these systems are evolving into increasing-ly more sophisticated simulators, such as the new solution from Invensys, which combines virtual reality and immersive technology with high-fidelity modeling to enhance knowledge protection and improve operator performance. Additionally, outside operators and other opera-tional team members can use such simulators to provide more realistic and complete training experiences, or to assist in other asset man-agement and operational activities.” Z

Immersive Simulator Extends Training Scope with “Augmented” Reality

“Augmented” reality describes the ability of EYEsim users to call up parts diagrams, work orders and even peer into process vessels while immersed in the training simulator environ-ment (above). Trainers can introduce abnormal situations such as this fire (below), requiring field operators to interact with control room operators to troubleshoot conditions that would be unsafe to recreate in actuality.


Invensys Operations Management’s new Avantis.PRO 5.0 is on display for the first time at the company’s North America Client Conference this week in Houston. Control editor-in-chief Walt Boyes and Paul Studebaker, editor-in-chief of Plant Services, got a sneak peek at the how the new enterprise asset management (EAM) software improves asset reliability

and lowers operating costs while simul-taneously making those benefits easier for users to realize. Walt and Paul talked with Kim Custeau, director of product marketing.

“Our Avantis.PRO 5.0 software is a comprehensive EAM solution that al-lows our clients to organize, track and understand asset utilization, perfor-

mance and availability, as well as to manage maintenance activity and costs over time,” said Custeau. “The updated solution enables role-based, online col-laboration and features Microsoft Click-Once Technology and other enhance-ments that will help clients manage the complexities of their business, improve their asset reliability and reduce their overall operating costs.”

Driven by customer feedback, the new version of the Avantis EAM software solution contributes to ease of use and productivity improvement and includes tailorable screen views. The updated software also includes innovations in data-type awareness and reference controls, multi-column list controls and maintenance entity value optimization.

“The Avantis.PRO 5.0 solution has the architecture and infrastructure to be our next-generation enterprise operations management tool.” Scott Lampe, Hen-drick Motorsports’ CFO, is bullish on the potential of the Avantis.PRO 5.0 EAM solution to help execute the team’s business strategy. (Photo courtesy Hen-dricks Motorsports.) “Customers have been using words like ‘digestible’ and ‘tailorable’ in defining what they need from a software provider to help them manage increasingly complex business requirements. They say they don’t need more data; they need ways to make better use of it. And they need to keep costs in control. This latest release responds to such concerns by bridging the desktop and Web to visualize, ma-nipulate and share information about the

health and performance of their assets,” Custeau said.

The Avantis.PRO 5.0 solution augments the deep EAM functionality of its prede-cessor, but includes the architecture and infrastructure necessary for next-genera-tion enterprise operations management. Built with Microsoft’s .NET framework and Windows Forms and compliant with Mi-crosoft User Interface standards, the soft-ware allows decision makers across the enterprise to personalize views and pages and create real-time interfaces to the data they need. A new Maintenance Map, for example, displays in real time the mainte-nance health status of the entire organiza-tion. Another new feature, a Contractor Management module, manages contractor expenses, prices and pricing rules, and approval and reconciliation of invoices for both current and past projects to facilitate collaboration in tracking, estimating and negotiating contractor costs.

“The Avantis.PRO 5.0 solution has the architecture and infrastructure to be our next-generation enterprise operations management tool,” said Scott Lampe, chief financial officer, Hendrick Motor-sports, who participated in the Avantis 5.0 early adopter process. “In addition to leveraging the new functionality in this release, our executives, team lead-ers, purchasing agents and other staff will also take advantage of the ability to customize page views that will help them execute our business strategy. We look forward to quickly upgrading to the Avantis.PRO 5.0 solution to be ready for the 2010 race season.” Z

“The Avantis.PRO 5.0 solution has the architecture and infrastructure to be our next-generation enterprise opera-tions management tool.” Scott Lampe, Hendrick Motorsports’ CFO, is bullish on the potential of the Avantis.PRO 5.0 EAM solution to help execute the team’s business strategy. (Photo courtesy Hendricks Motorsports.)

Avantis.PRO 5.0 Asset Management Tool Features Improved User Productivity, Collaboration

Keep the bad guys out and the good guys accessible. To do this, security begins and ends with awareness. Sandwiched in between are the protective actions, which are taken in response to the initial security evaluation and before the reevaluation about what to do next.

Of course, this is very similar to the sense-decide-act triangle that helps orga-nize most process control applications and facilities. However, knowing this doesn’t necessarily make an effective and work-able security program any easier to set up and maintain. And, at least initially, these difficulties can be compounded by new rules and standards, such as those from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) and its Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) program.

To help users set up or improve their security, Invensys Operations Manage-ment has launched a comprehensive array of technology and services designed to help clients protect their plant assets from cyber incidents. The company unveiled these security solutions today at its North America Client Conference in Houston. These The services are available on an ongoing basis; the tools will be released in January 2010.

As part of its new I/A Series 8.5 soft-ware suite, these cybersecurity solutions include control system enhancements and consulting services that support the compliance requirements of the major new cybersecurity standards, such as those established by NERC. The Federal

Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is adopting NERC standards CIP-001 through CIP-009, compelling companies to become NERC-compliant by the year 2010. This means having to learn the require-ments, design and implement the policies and procedures and, in some cases, install added equipment.

“Technology solutions implemented through the control system, intrusion prevention, firewall and other technology are important, but comprehensive cyber protection also involves changes in policies and practices that have little to do with technology,” said Ernie Rakaczky, Invensys’ principal security architect. “Emerging standards reflect this. We’re pleased that we can offer our clients the technology they need and do so as a consultative part-ner, first, to help them identify vulnerabili-ties in their current operations, and then to provide standards-compliant solutions to fill those gaps.”

Rakaczky added that Invensys began its cybersecurity project about five years ago when it examined its core solutions and tools, found some places where they could better help users secure their applications, and then sought ways within the I/A Series to facilitate the process. “These core ele-ments included enabling password changes, improving routing access, closing unneeded processes and protecting against malware,” he said. “We’ve added a lot of security func-tions that no one else is doing.”

“Comprehensive cyber protection also involves changes in policies and practices

that have little to do with technology.” Invensys’ Ernie Rakaczky discussed new tools built into the company’s I/A Series platform designed to assist users in securing their automation systems. To de-velop some of its new security tools and services, he added that Invensys recently partnered with McAfee Security to adapt and implement its ePolicy Orchestration 4.0 software to help protect against in-fected flash drives or DVDs. Invensys also is using host-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) methods to help maintain firewalls settings and manage data.

“This all comes down to the ones and zeros and how to protect them,” said Rakaczky. “Then you have to ask who has the authority to access them and who really needs it. Doing this won’t disrupt business flow and should really make it more efficient. Some engineers may look at this as a big chore, but it’s also part of life that we all have to get used to doing. And the fact is improving security can help you understand, know and manage your whole network better.”

Through a combination of system-centric and consulting solutions, Invensys’ cybersecurity solutions are designed to deliver many benefits for their users. The first is a significant reduction in risk associated with cybersecurity threats. This enables a higher level of performance and predictability of client systems and networks, prevents possible business outages, and diminishes the threat of lost revenue due to serious safety, environ-

mental and personnel catastrophes.I/A Series features that support cyberse-

curity protection and compliance include its newly enhanced ability to create stronger passwords. This is done by mix-ing types of characters, controlling length, managing failed password attempts and


“Comprehensive cyber protection also involves changes in policies and practices that have little to do with technology.” Invensys’ Ernie Rakaczky discussed new tools built into the company’s I/A Series platform designed to assist users in securing their automation systems.

New I/A Series Tools Aid Cybersecurity Compliance

using password aging. Also, new I/A Series capabilities include the ability to reduce lock-down security vulner-ability, and the company has strengthened its worksta-tion hardware to remove unused programs, services and ports. Both of the primary control processors used in I/A Series systems, for example, have received Level 1 Achilles Certification from Wurldtech, a leading provider of cybersecurity testing and certification for critical infra-structure industries.

“A distributed control system retrofit and implemen-tation can increase production performance and pro-vide cybersecurity protection and compliance at the same time. We recently installed a DCS for a power industry client that helped them meet NERC standards well before their deadline and increased their engi-neering functionality by approximately 50%. This gave them the ability to add new displays, implement logic changes and install new parameter interlocks for bet-ter handling and alarm management,” explained Mat-thew DeAthos, Invensys’ portfolio marketing manager.

Depending on the client’s situation, a typical Invensys cybersecurity consulting offering includes the following services:

• Gap analysis assessment against standards,• Development of a plan to address shortcomings,• Development of an overall security architecture,• Integration with IT and other systems and proce-

dures,• Validation of cybersecurity policies and procedures,

and• Execution and implementation of security upgrades

and procedures.In fact, Rakaczky cautioned that power companies

that don’t comply with new standards could face significant fines levied by NERC and FERC auditors be-ginning in 2010. Fines will be based on the percentage of requirements met and the number of days the plant remains non-compliant. Besides the NERC cybersecu-rity standards, which apply only to the power industry, other standards are emerging from the U.S. Depart-ment of Homeland Security (DHS), the International Society of Automation (ISA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). While these do not yet have compliance deadlines, they provide manufacturers with additional incentive and guidance to protecting their assets. Z


Reducing risk and improving delivered system quality are the primary goals of a new package of internal tools and processes that the Invensys Operations Management global delivery team has developed and discussed at the company’s North America Client Con-ference this week in Houston. The new workbench tools, which already are being used in pilot projects, are designed to give more time to firm up require-ments and define project data, automatically validate design before configuration, test a system throughout its life cycle and use medium-fidelity simulation for earlier operator training. It takes design information and combines it with engineering standards and automation rules, and the automation tools create the control, safety and simulation configuration.

“Automation projects face two types of chal-lenges—the pinch and the lever,” said Greg McKim, principal consulting engineer, dynamic simulation, at Invensys. “The pinch can come from increasingly complex plant designs with shorter drawing-board-to-completion times. Changes can come from the end user, the engineering firm or the vendors. The automa-tion system is a last-in-line choke point, but the start-up date can’t change.”

The lever, on the other hand, can work for or against you. “The automation contract is a small percentage of the total cost of the project,” explained McKim. “At a typical big process plant start-up, every lost day is lost revenue. A traditional factory-acceptance-test (FAT) process verifies that we built what you told us to build, but it doesn’t validate that the system will work. The solution is to automate the process and validate the design.”

“Things aren’t quite ready when we need them.” Invensys’ David James (pictured) and Greg McKim discussed how the company’s new Engineering Toolbox can help shorten the time required to develop an operator simulator. Every project begins with the

Simulation Workbench Reduces Start-Up Complexity, Uncertainty

award of the contract, explained David James, principal engineer, Invensys Operations Management. “Because of the nature of the projects, they’re complex,” he said. “Things aren’t quite

ready when we need them. The infor-mation we’re working on continues to change. And if we’re introducing a training simulator, then that adds more problems, because it’s supposed to be based on what actually is there at the end.”

The Invensys team developed a set of tools called the Engineering Work-bench that uses a series of rules to auto-generate the application. “Once we understand the requirements and standards, we can take multiple data deliveries,” said McKim.

The Workbench tools address requirements definition, design, con-figure/build, test, install/commission and operate/maintain phases of the system life cycle.

“We’ve designed tools to use the data in the form you have it, rather than put the burden on the user to convert it,” said James. “To cap-ture design in a data-centric format and collaboration in design, there’s integrated design data. To capture Invensys and client engineering de-cisions, there are automation rules and libraries. And for pre-tested and documented modular engineering standards, there are engineering standards and best practices.”

Engineering Workbench, which sits above the tools, takes the templates developed during the non-critical phase. “It takes rules from the cli-

ent’s head,” explained James. “Using those templates and rules, it auto-matically generates the complete control module database and safety module database.”

Having addressed the pinch, McKim then addressed the lever, specifically as it pertains to tieback simulation.

“A virtual control system eliminates the need for hardware,” he said. “Traditional tieback gets its name from looping I/O modules back. We replace the hardware with FSIM, and we have a tool for automating the tieback simu-lation. This tool has a rulebook with search-and-paste criteria.”

Because P&IDs have become smarter, the group was able to devel-op an auto-model-generator. “It takes about one second per P&ID to make a model,” said McKim. “There’s a big time savings in terms of building the model. It picks up all the equipment and all the transfers, so it allows you to automatically tie it to the control system.”

McKim also differentiated veri-fication from validation. “Verifica-tion says, ‘We built one loop, and it works,’” he said. “Validation is a semi-representation of the process, and you can go through and make sure the application works. And de-bugging it virtually, instead of on the live unit, is much faster.” Z


“Things aren’t quite ready when we need them.” Invensys’ David James (pictured) and Greg McKim discussed how the company’s new Engineering Toolbox can help shorten the time required to develop an operator simulator.

Automating the supplier management process improves accuracy and frees up employees for more strategic initiatives, said Dave Wiedenfeld, senior architect, applications development, at fertilizer manu-facturer CF Industries in Donaldsonville, La.

“We don’t do approvals on purchase orders,” he said. “We do approvals on requisitions. That’s our con-trol point. We’ve automated that to a certain extent. But if there’s anything out of tolerance, it will have to go through the manual approval. We set up all our vendors to automatically create invoices.”

Speaking at the 2009 Invensys North American Client Conference in Houston, Wiedenfeld explained how CF has achieved a significant reduction in the clerical and transactional efforts required to manage its purchase catalog, primary vendors and prices. CF requests materials, purchases them and pays vendors using Avantis.PRO, Invensys-provided application pro-gram interfaces (APIs), and with the help of Invensys partners B2B Connex for supply-chain collaboration and IMA for catalog management.

“Supply chain management means buying stuff cheaper, better and faster.” CF Industries’ Dave Wie-denfeld discussed how Avantis has freed the compa-ny’s employees to focus on more strategic activities.

“Supply chain management means buying stuff cheaper, better and faster,” said Wiedenfeld. “The big reason to automate is to improve accuracy. You want to reduce your overall procurement lead times. You want to improve the overall performance and get bet-ter feedback for vendors. It also reduces processing costs, but the biggest reason is increasing the time available for strategic activities.”

Some of the opportunities procurement automation offers are the abilities to create a clean purchase cata-log, to utilize procurement contracts and to automate a workflow process, said Wiedenfeld. CF also has cre-ated a vendor portal that it uses to process requests for quote (RFQ) and manage supply.

“A clean catalog is very important,” said Wieden-feld. “If you have consistent naming, you’ll have less confusion with your vendors. We process new addi-

CF Industries Streamlines Procurement with Avantis

tions through a catalog manager. Keeping your descrip-tions consistent throughout makes it a lot easier.”

For its catalog management, CF uses Invensys partner IMA. “We do not allow non-catalog purchases,” said Wie-denfeld. “If there’s a non-catalog item on requisition, the system will route it for inclusion.”

Procurement contracts eliminate the need for numerous single transactions to process. The contracts also can be coupled with aggregate data over time to reduce spend through leveraged negotiations, suggested Wiedenfeld.

Auto-creation of requisitions streamlines workflow at CF. “We have a concept called ‘control-release’ requisi-tions,” said Wiedenfeld. “We have an audit for prices of contracted SKUs, and once work tasks are placed in the backlog, pick lists and requisitions are created. We strongly encourage our purchases through work orders. Our automated workflow system will check them. We’ve set up control-release requisitions for things that are done repetitively. You know what you’re going to spend. Why force people to do that every time? The workflow man-ager will automatically approve each requisition as long as it’s within spec. It automatically creates a PO and sends an email to the requestor. Price and vendor resource vari-ances are routed for review.”

Invoice approval of receivables might still require some custodial documentation. “If it’s out of tolerance, it’ll have to go through the approval process,” said Wiedenfeld. “If it’s not a receivable, we’ll need to verify that we received it.”

CF’s supply chain collaboration model, or vendor portal, is a window for vendors to communicate and deliver an item at the price indicated. “They’ll get an email through the portal when there’s a request, including price, deliver date and terms,” explained Wiedenfeld. “One feature of the portal is automatic expediting. The PO is updated from the portal and confirmed. Nothing can be received before it’s confirmed and updated.”

Wiedenfeld said CF also uses Avantis for its RFQ pro-cessing. “You can create RFQs in Avantis,” he explained. “We send it up to the portal. Once the vendor responds with a bid, it’s updated.” Bids are analyzed based on vari-ous factors; vendor resources and prices are updated or created; and the bid is awarded.

“We need to stage material,” he explained. “We’re a hydrocarbon plant, and a lot of our work is centered

around turnarounds, which means we need to get materi-als out fast. The stage feature is not available in Avantis, but we use the worksheet process. Our issue transaction worksheets are pre-populated with pick lists, and our warehouse transaction worksheets control activity based on the status from tasks, POs and the portal.”

Evaluated receipt settlement (ERS), however, is a feature that is available in Avantis to create invoices from POs and receipts. “We use ERS for everything as data entry automation,” said Wiedenfeld. “Our AP clerks don’t have to enter anything by hand. The PO number is the invoice number. True ERS completely eliminates invoicing from vendor; they don’t even send invoices to us any-more. We’re not entirely there yet. If you have accurate prices and a vendor you buy a lot from, you can set up to pay them weekly, instead of processing and paying several invoices per day.”

A decision support system (DSS) helps to analyze the data you put in the system. “How much did I spend on fasteners, for example?” said Wiedenfeld. “It can be a powerful tool. The caveat is it needs to be accurate data. You also can drill in on these categories and tell a vendor how much business you expect to do over a year, for example, and negotiate a deal for better price.” Z


“Supply chain management means buying stuff cheaper, better and faster.” CF Industries’ Dave Wiedenfeld discussed how Avantis has freed the company’s employees to focus on more strategic activities.

The refinery of the future will be better tied to the val-ue chain, matching models to business requirements, said Dr. Martin Turk, Invensys’ director, global industry solutions, HPI, at the 2009 Invensys North America Client Conference in Houston. “Outside of research and development, manufacturing is the only segment of an operating company’s supply chain where value is added,” he said. “Why is this important? The goal is to add value when you bring in materials, and manufac-turing is the largest financial lever under an operating company’s control.”

Over the past 20 years, refineries have made con-sistent hardware and software upgrades, but the most important aspect of future refineries will be employees, knowledge, performance indicators and performance measurement, said Turk. “It is a journey, not a destina-tion. We’ve seen the proliferation of digital sensors, and that will continue,” he explained. “But understand-ing what’s flowing in the pipes is really important in terms of maximizing the value of everything you do. By understanding what you’re bringing in and know-ing what your reactions and separation processes are doing, every time you break a molecule apart, every transformation should add value.”

“Every time an operator makes a change, he ought to know whether he’s making or costing his company money,” Turk said. “For example, through its Molecule Management initiative, ExxonMobil claims to be on track to capture half a billion dollars a year in benefits.”

“Operators need to become proprietors.” Invensys’ Martin Turk discussed the need for operators to under-stand the profit implications of their decisions in the refinery of the future. Process analysis will continue to grow in importance, added Turk. “Information is go-ing to be critical, diagnostic or performance-based,” he said. “Fieldbus technologies will consolidate, although a large legacy of multiple buses will remain. And universal gateways for fieldbus technologies will be peer devices to traditional controls.”

The differences will be in how information is treated, with the ability to adaptively change access to information and controls, with the seamless flow of information be-

tween the plant and the enterprise and with information being proactively pushed to decision makers in context, rather than requiring them to find it and analyze it. “Reac-tive browsing will no longer be sufficient. You’ll see a lot more proactive stimulus in the future. “Performance will be measured using multi-dimensional KPIs, like safety

compliance vs. training hours or environmental compli-ance vs. throughput,” said Turk.

“Operators need to become proprietors,” he said. “The transmitter, the DCS and simulation software all changed clients’ workflows. Integrated automation and ‘business control loop’ systems will also change clients’ workflows, which will in turn change when, where, how, which and why people team together to prevent or address problems and take advantage of opportunities. My dream is to be able to have the executives share goals with the business manager, who translates it to the plant management, who share it with the process management level, passing KPIs down from the executive level and performance measures up from the process-management level.” Z


Billions of Dollars at Stake in the Refinery of the Future

“Operators need to become proprietors.” Invensys’ Martin Turk discussed the need for operators to understand the profit implications of their deci-sions in the refinery of the future.

In the future, all facets of business intelligence will provide decision makers with experience-based and model-based guidance in real time, explained Turk. Automated, dynamic workflows will eliminate manual data processing and infor-mation reconciliation. “We capture knowledge, and we need to deploy that more,” he said. “We need more model-based guidance to make more informed decisions, using models to give us a picture of what’s going on. Now it’s not just a num-ber on a table. The operators and engineers of the future are gamers. They live in this virtual world.”

Turk emphasized the need to recruit more young people to the profession because of the diminishing talent pool and the constant retirement of engineers, who are walking out the door with 30 to 40 years of knowledge and experi-ence. “The future of the world is greatly dependent on sci-ence and engineering,” he said. “Experienced knowledge workers in unique disciplines will be a rare resource and will be globally distributed. Few people want to live where the new energy discoveries are being made or where hy-drocarbons are processed, and they don’t want to work in hazardous environments. The fewer people we can have in a dangerous environment, the better we are. The next gen-eration is accustomed to models and the use of simulators. There will be networks of training and collaboration centers around the world.”

All information will pool into one federated view of data, and business intelligence will exist in the DCS, predicted Turk. “Giant data centers for advanced applications and new ways to manage telecommunications risks will be used,” he said. “Everything will be delivered through a universal interface. Equipment and process performance management will be highly automated, context-sensitive and predictive in nature.”

The drastic increase in I/O points over the past 25 years demonstrates Turk’s point. “In 1985, you’ve got low I/O counts of around 5,000 and an I/O ratio of 3:1,” he explained. “By 2005, I/O counts were at 60,000 with an I/O ratio of 8:1. The prediction we’d made for 2025 of I/O counts at 350,000 were woefully conservative. Those are already here today. Also, in 1985, you had opera-tors on panel instruments and a lot of people running a process. In 2005, we saw the compressed console that can give the depth and breadth of information. In 2025, you’ll have collaboration walls with multiple displays at the command centers. Conference rooms will become business management centers.” Z


Invensys Operations Management demonstrated its commitment to in-teroperability and consistency across all brands, a simplified and scalable product line and strategic partner-ships with best-in-class suppliers at the 2009 Invensys North American Client Conference in Houston.

Betty Naylor-McDevitt, director, DCS business, Invensys Operations Management, explained how the company’s I/A Series distributed control system is designed to improve productivity for all plant personnel, citing ongoing emphases on engineer-ing, operations and maintenance, cybersecurity, fieldbus integration, Foundation fieldbus initiatives, 100 Se-ries I/O migration, life-cycle manage-ment and competitive migration.

“Product line simplification means fewer products to support and main-tain,” she said. “It’s a journey. We’re not going to be there overnight. InFusion View will be our only HMI. InFusion Historian will be our only historian. InFusion System Manager will be our only system manager. It’ll take us a few years to get there, but that’s our journey.”

“We want to focus on being the best controls company.” Invensys’ Betty Naylor-McDevitt outlined the company’s plans to continue to

streamline and simplify its automation platform offering toward the ultimate goal of improved user productivity.

Scalable product lines will mean cost reductions. “Right now, it’s all or nothing. We want to have just

the functions you need at the price point the market dictates. We can unbundle or create bundles that are base functionality, instead of full functionality,” said Naylor-McDevitt.

“We want to focus on being the

best controls company,” she said. “For other things, we will partner with other companies and leverage their status in the market place.”

Building on the 2008 release of Message Manager for the InFusion Engineering Environment, which allows alarm shower detection and suppression, updated high-speed data analysis software and sequence-of-events software, Invensys released the MOD300 plug-in migration solu-tion for HART, which eliminates rewir-ing, and the AC Termination Series, which eliminates channel cross-talk over long distances, in April.

“We recognized that for their analog modules, people are moving to HART, rather than 4-20,” said Naylor-McDevitt. “We built a HART-enabled module that can run as a 4-20. We’re still the only one in the market that builds these cards in the form factor in which the competitors’ cards were built.”

I/A Series v.8.4.3, newly re-leased this month, is designed for any Zone 1 or Zone 2 hazardous environment. It features IEE Change Tracking via FoxCTS and integrated Pepperl+Fuchs intrinsically safe I/O with increased I/O density and a smaller footprint, and it appears native to the I/A series. “A lot of North American plants are looking to

“We want to focus on being the best controls company.” Invensys’ Betty Naylor-McDevitt outlined the company’s plans to continue to streamline and simplify its automation platform offering toward the ultimate goal of improved user productivity.

Simplicity and Scalability Driving I/A Series Roadmap

save some space and looking to replace explosion-proof cabinets with this solution, like they already do in Europe,” said Naylor-McDevitt. “This solution is incapable of emit-ting enough heat or energy to cause an explosion.”

The 8.5 version of I/A Series, planned for January re-lease, will include Foundation fieldbus in the field, cyber-security enhancements, InFusion 2.0 and InFusion System Manager. “Foundation fieldbus control in the field is kind of new,” said Naylor-McDevitt. “We are 100%-compliant with the mandatory aspects of the standard, and we took it a step beyond to reduce complexity. The benefits include engineering efficiency for fast and easy deployment for device commissioning built into the field device manager, based on FDT, for any device from any vendor.”

Invensys is actually chairing the FDT committee, explained Naylor-McDevitt. “This standard says the DCS vendor supplies the engineering environment, and the de-vice supplier provides advanced diagnostics applications,” she said. “It gives you the choice of devices in combina-tion with the system of your choice. It’s a very powerful tool for doing predictive maintenance.”

New I/A Series security features include changeable passwords and lock-down security, which allows for DCS cybersecurity compliance with leading standards.

The InFusion System Manager has the same look and feel, but with new features. “It now has a tree structure and is intuitively obvious,” explained Naylor-McDevitt, who said her group will attempt to have one major feature release each September and have a maintenance release each year in May.

“As of April, we did our last Nodebus release,” said Naylor-McDevitt. “From this point forward, we’ll be doing safety updates only. As of January, all remaining Nodebus stations are mature, driven by component obsolescence. We build products to last 15-20 years. If you’re buying on the front end, you have 15-20 years of guaranteed sup-port. If you’re buying on the tail end or mature end, the remaining years of expected support are fewer, so you’re buying into a shorter life cycle.”

The 2010 roadmap of releases also includes an updated Provox migration solution for HART in June, a 100 Series I/O migration in September and an I/A Series on Windows 7 and Server 2008, also in September. “We’re skipping Vis-ta,” noted Naylor-McDevitt. “We want the multiprocessor multicore support, and it’s fully supported by Microsoft.” Z


Adding just a pinch of green chem-istry and sustainable attributes to your drab, routine process action reports can transform them into delicious and healthy recipes for sustainability that comply with environmental rules and improve your bottom line, too. Bon appetit!

Well, like any cooking show, this sounds easy. Actually doing it is a little bit harder—but not too much.

To help specialty chemical engineers add some of these sustainable practices to their pro-cesses, Dennis Brandl, of BR&L Consulting, presented “Manufac-turing Science Model Extensions to Address Product and Process Stability” at the 2009 Invensys North America Client Conference this week in Houston.

Brandl demonstrated that, while green chemistry can help users comply with sustainability regula-tions, it also can be very good for productivity, profitability and other business goals. Specifically, he reported on his work with Pfizer to help it redesign several phar-maceutical production processes to reduce the solvents it uses and their resulting waste, eliminate some unit operations, but increase productivity and remove solvents from another process, but still in-crease its yield. He also described how users can adopt green chem-istry and sustainable practices in their own processes and achieve similar gains.

To get everyone on the same page, Brandl introduced several

primary concepts in green chemis-try and sustainability. For example, he reported that “manufacturing science” describes the body of scientific knowledge, regulations and principles involved in trans-forming materials and information into products, and that one of its components is the development of scientifically sound recipes based on sustainability principles. Next, he defined sustainability as a “characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely.”

“In manufacturing, this means development and deployment

of processes and products that conserve energy, reduce waste materials, reduce use of non-sus-tainable materials in the produc-tion processes, and increase the recyclability of products and waste materials,” said Brandl. “As a result, we develop processes that don’t produce more waste than they need to and don’t use more energy than they need to.”

Brandl added that green chem-istry in the life sciences is closely related to sustainability because it also seeks to:

• Prevent waste,• Design safer chemicals and

Sustainable Chemistry Can Mean Good Business Too

“Sustainability can deliver significant economic benefits.” Dennis Brandl of BR&L Consulting demonstrated how green chemistry can help manufacturers comply with regulations as well as enable productivity, profitability and other business goals.

products,• Design less hazardous chemical syntheses,• Use renewable feedstock,• Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents,• Avoid chemical derivatives,• Maximize atom economy,• Use safer solvents and reaction conditions,• Increase energy efficiency,• Design chemicals and products to degrade after use,• Analyze in real time to prevent pollution,• Minimize potential for accidents. “Sustainability can deliver significant economic ben-

efits.” Dennis Brandl of BR&L Consulting demonstrated how green chemistry can help manufacturers comply with regulations as well as enable productivity, profitabil-ity and other business goals.

In practical terms, Brandl reported that Pfizer recent-ly redesigned its sertraline (Zoloft) commercial process to eliminate the number and volume of solvents used and reduce titanium dioxide waste and HCl waste. “The new process uses 26 liters/kg of product versus the original 98 liters/kg used in its first commercial route,” said Brandl. “Pfizer received the 2002 Presi-dential Green Chemistry Award for Greener Synthetic Pathways for this redesign.”

Similarly, he added that Pfizer improved its sildenafil manufacturing process by reducing solvent usage of 22 liters/kg to 7 liters/kg by improving the synthesis route and by implementing more efficient solvent recovery. As a result, Pfizer received the U.K. Green Technology award in 2003 for these efforts by improv-ing its e-factor to a 6 rating.

Likewise, because Pfizer’s atoravastin calcium (Lipitor) product uses a key hydroxy nitrile (HN) build-ing block, Brandl explained that its Codexis partner devised three bioengineered enzymes to improve volumetric productivity by 100 fold of the reduction reaction and improve its cyanation reaction by 4,000 fold over the HN process. “This resulted in a new process with fewer unit operations, improved yield and worker safety, and reduced formation of byprod-ucts, waste and equipment usage,” said Brandl. “Co-dexis received the 2006 Presidential Green Chemis-try award for Greener Reaction Conditions.”

Finally, Pfizer developed a new enzymatic route for manufacturing its gabapentin (Lyrica) product. “It elimi-nated organic solvents from three reaction steps, while increasing the overall yield. This also minimized waste significantly,” he said.

To develop and achieve some of these green chemis-try and sustainability gains, Brandl stressed that users must examine both their product development and their process development, and then consider the sustainabili-ty factors associated with those products and processes, such as waste, non-renewable resources and energy. Generally, green chemistry is part of intermediate and final activity pharmaceutical ingredient (API) production steps, and the waste material issues tend to crop up dur-ing the unit dosage manufacturing and packaging steps.

“The task on the manufacturing side is how to best capture these steps. The ISA 88 batch standard de-fines general recipes and capturing chemical and other process steps,” explained Brandl. “As a result, there are 30 to 40 basic tasks you can do in these manufac-turing processes, and this gives us a library of items for which we can consider the sustainability factors and possibly add them to the process action step.

“For instance, we can look at a general recipe and then also ask about its waste and recovered material. So we’re looking at what it takes to make a product and what it takes to reduce its waste at the same time,” he said. “For example a typical process action report for a blending application might have numbers on weight, density, moisture and other physical char-acteristics, but a sustainability report on a process ac-tion will add measurements of energy use, waste and/or recovered material to the batch record.” This con-sideration of sustainability factors also can be plugged into a general recipe model or added during other steps, such as the R&D product synthesis description, global equipment property descriptions, global mate-rial specifications and global process definition.

“In general, sustainability can deliver significant economic benefits,” said Brandl. “But there also will be additional information needed, such as e-factors, material disposal costs and other waste issues. Still, general reci-pes will provide a good basis for manufacturing alterna-tives and documenting sustainability.” Z


Invensys Operations Management an-nounced that it has signed an agreement with PAS, a supplier of operations and au-tomation effectiveness software, to provide Invensys clients a comprehensive suite of system documentation and configuration management tools and services.

“A back-documentation and “where-used’ facility for our Foxboro I/A Series, InFusion and Triconex systems is a high priority for our customers,” said Betty Naylor-McDevitt, director of marketing, Invensys Operations

Management. “Leveraging our strong indus-try expertise, we chose the Integrity software solution because of its comprehensive scal-ability. Integrity allows us to provide a scope of offerings from simple system documenta-tion to robust configuration management and full mapping of the breadth of systems installed in our customers’ plants.”

Called Integrity, the PAS “Automation Genome” solution maps the databases, programs, displays and interconnec-tions within and among plant automation systems, including Foxboro I/A Series distributed control systems, InFusion enter-prise control systems and Triconex safety instrumented systems. Invensys Opera-tions Management will provide its custom-ers with a choice of three levels of Integrity Software, allowing them the flexibility to match the solution to their specific needs.

“The PAS Integrity Software solution provides the capabilities that Invensys’ clients need. It simplifies the complexities of their entire automation infrastructure and enables them to capture and share knowledge in real time to improve delivery of automation system projects,” said Chris Lyden, president, PAS. “We are pleased to extend our business partnership with Invensys Operations Management for the benefit of their customers.” Z


Invensys Partners for Documentation, Mapping Solution

“It’s much bigger than just our systems.” Invensys’ Alex Johnson explained that a key reason for Invensys part-nering with PAS for its solution is the need to manage documentation across the multi-vendor environment typical of most process manufacturers.

“Triconex still acts like the little company that could, even though we’ve long been part of our larger Invensys organization,” said Joseph Scalia, control system architect, Invensys Operations Management. “And while Triconex isn’t going anywhere, we are retooling because the needs of our users are being retooled. We’ve reinvested to deliver the technologies that our users say they need. We’ve also continued to honor our users’ commitment to Triconex by keeping our form factor the same and by providing a migration path for applica-tion software. This ensures an attractive path forward for our users’ current SIS (safety instrumented system) technology.”

Scalia and Alejandro Fung, Triconex’s safety systems marketing manager, pre-sented and presided over the “Triconex Update and Roadmap” brand session this week at the 2009 In-vensys North America Client Conference.

“You make a lot of pieces, but what about some software to tie it to together?” Inven-sys’ Joseph Scalia on the company’s inten-tion to broaden its Triconex safety system offering with manage-ment software. Scalia first traced Triconex’s first 25 years of in-novation, such as the introduction of its first Tricon v5 TMR controller in 1986, its first TÜV Functional Safety certification for ESD in 1991 and the launch of its Trident TMR controller in 2000. More recent milestones include the release of Tricon v10.3 and TCM with embedded OPC server and Achilles’ Cybersecurity certification in 2007, and the launch of Trident HART v2.0 in 2008. Upcoming releases include Trident’s integration with Invensys’ InFusion enterprise control system in 2010.

Meanwhile, this coming December, Triconex plans to release its Trident v2.1.1 high-resolution, digital input and enhanced pulse input. In April 2010, it will launch its Triconex Soft Suite with Windows 7 and Server 2000 support, as well as its TriStation 1131 v4.7, EnDM v2.4, SOE Recorder v4.2, DDE Server v2.3 and Emula-tor v1.0. And, in July 2010, Triconex will debut its Safety View v1.0, which is a safety, health and environment video display unit (SHE VDU) with bypass management.

Taking Care of Users Tops Triconex Priority List

“You make a lot of pieces, but what about some software to tie it to together?” Invensys’ Joseph Scalia on the company’s intention to broaden its Triconex safety system offering with management software.

“People have been saying, ‘You make a lot of pieces, but what about some software to tie it to together?’ Well, Safety View v1.0 is our first whack at safety software,” said Scalia. Though he acknowledges that software is a relatively new area for Triconex, Scalia encourages users to evaluate and consider using Safety View because it comes from the company that has protected their critical investments and plant operations running, with virtually no spurious trips, for more than 20 years.

Looking further down to road, Scalia reports that Triconex plans to pursue intelligent communications from TÜV-certified Foundation fieldbus safety instrumented functions (FF-SIF) devices, FF-SIF compliant logic solvers, and NERC-CIP compliance.

“We’re going to continue to honor our design premises, while we keep delivering on your expectations,” said Scalia to the user group’s members. “You made us your safety and critical control choice for 25 years. Let us prove to you that you made the right choice for the next 25 years.” Z


Obsolescence occurs when a person, object or service is no longer wanted, even though it may still be in good working order, said Steve Murray, control systems supervisor at metals manufacturer Asarco, during his presentation at the 2009 Inven-sys North America Client Conference this week in Houston.

Murray further divided obsolescence into two types: technical and functional. “Technical obsolescence occurs when superior products become available, when incompatibility with newer products cre-ates an island of technology, or when prod-ucts become useless due to changes in other products,” said Murray. “Functional obsolescence occurs when equipment no longer functions as it did when it was new, the failure rate increases, spare parts are unavailable or expensive, a manufacturer no longer supports it, or there’s no longer internal support available.”

Murray should know. Asarco had to replace some old equipment in the 1990s. The company’s Fisher Provox DCS and Modicon PLC systems needed replace-

ment because of a lack of formal support and increased difficulty obtaining spares and repairs. The company purchased used spare parts and incurred high-cost repairs from third parties, but refurbished “new” spare parts often would not work. Down-time due to PLC breakdowns increased dramatically. Asarco finally replaced the Provox DCS with a Foxboro I/A DCS, replac-ing every component from processors to field modules. The engineering and instal-lation took nine months, and change-over occurred during a 30-day plant rebuild.

“The cost of using obsolete equipment must be balanced against the cost of re-placement.” Asarco’s Steve Murray offered tips for mitigating the effects of technical and functional obsolescence.

And while equipment age isn’t a justi-fication for replacement, it is a factor in failure rate and maintenance costs, Murray said. “Electrical components, like capaci-tors and semiconductor chips, have limited life. In aluminum electrolytic capacitors, capacitance decreases over time while resistance increases, and electrolyte

Mitigating the Inevitable Pain of Obsolescence

“The cost of using obsolete equipment must be balanced against the cost of replacement.” Asarco’s Steve Mur-ray offered tips for mitigating the effects of technical and functional obsolescence.

degradation due to heat can significantly impact the lifetime.” Capacitor life is cut in half every 10 °C rise in temperature, and the life can be as little as 2,000 hours at temperatures of 85 °C. Semiconductor chip life cycles have changed since their inception, said Murray. In the 1970s, chips were expected to last hundreds of years, whereas today’s chip users expect merely a few years of life from them.

Each product life-cycle stage comes with its own cost and performance. “The prod-uct in the market introduction stage has high costs and high risk,” explained Murray. “In the growth stage, costs are reduced as sales increase.” The highest profits are realized in the mature stage as sales peak, and in the decline stage, sales decline and prices drop, leading to lower profits.

“Obsolescence is a perception of risk,” he continued. “Equipment can easily outlast manufacturer’s support, and the cost of us-ing obsolete equipment must be balanced against the cost of replacement. All equip-ment either is obsolete or will become so.”

Because of the inevitable stages, obsoles-cence is now often planned into the product life cycle. Introduced by Brooks Stevens as a benign concept in the 1950s, planned obsolescence has become controversial, said Murray. “Maximizing profits, gaining market or technological superiority, minimiz-ing costs through value engineering and anticipation of their own suppliers’ planned obsolescence are some of the reasons for planned obsolescence,” he said.

Murray advised listeners to choose products that are in the early stages of their life cycle, purchase spares as part of initial capital outlay, find out manufac-turer’s support options and track record and be aware of end-of-life dates when making new equipment purchases. “On existing equipment, stockpile spare parts, find alternate sources of parts and repair, upgrade portions of complex systems and use their parts as spares, and encourage manufacturers to develop replacement modules using new compo-nents,” he recommended. Z

The planning and scheduling of resources in a refin-ery depend on the availability, allocation and use of hydrogen. That’s why optimization of hydrogen treat-gas systems can offer so many benefits, said Marco Andrei of ExxonMobil Research & Engineering (EMRE) at the 2009 Invensys North America Client Conference in Houston.

Why is hydrogen important in refining operations?“It needs to meet the desired molecular specifications

and to meet increasingly tight product sulfur specs,” said Andrei. “Product margin upgrades are driven by the avail-ability of hydrogen. Supply and management of hydrogen is central to optimizing the refinery run plan. Resource planning and scheduling is dependent on hydrogen.”

Once the treat gas is consumed, it finds its way to the fuel-gas system. “Often refineries are limited by the handling of the amount of gas,” explained Andrei. “The cap limit often rides on the fuel-gas limit. The availability of hydrogen also affects your crude mix. We want to optimize the hydrogen supply and how it’s distributed, and we want to prioritize which consumer in the process should get it.”

Hydrogen treat-gas systems are very complex and subject to many disturbances. Hydrogen suppliers can be steam reformer hydrogen plants, catalytic reform-ers, chemical plants, hydrogen recovery membranes or third-party suppliers. “Producers are disturbances or opportunities,” said Andrei. “They are things you have to live with.”

Consumers of hydrogen include cat feed hydrotreaters, residual conversion units, hydro de-sulfurization units for fuels, lubes and solvents, and hydrocrackers. The disposi-tion of treat gas can be cascaded to consumers over the hydrogen network through hydrogen recovery membranes, and ultimately it ends up in the refinery fuel gas system.

“Hydrogen producers are disturbances or opportuni-ties--they are things you have to live with.” ExxonMobil’s

Marco Andrei explored the ins and outs of refinery hy-drogen flow optimization. Constraints are the minimum and maximum hydrogen production capacities, minimum and maximum purge-gas valve openings, and treat-gas compression. And some optimization opportunities are the balance or trade-off of hydrogen purity against volume, the distribution of treat gas and allocation of

hydrogen to units with the highest upgrade.Andrei identifies six ways ExxonMobil developed to

capture these opportunities to optimize—ROMeo process models, best-fit, on-line model-tuning strategy, real-time pricing updates, real-time, on-line implementation, regula-tory controls and daily user/workflow processes.

“ROMeo process models rigorously track hydrogen purities across the entire treat-gas network,” explained Andrei. The ROMeo Model Library includes models such as source, sink, mixer, splitter and flash. Also, in-house first-principles custom models can be used to predict

treat-gas composition changes, product yield or composi-tion and reversal of treat-gas flows.

“The best-fit, on-line model tuning strategy ensures predictions to keep up with the plant,” said Andrei. “It relies on the measurement model to calculate offsets be-tween plant and model values and minimizes deviations from plant values while weighing their accuracy. Weighted offsets can be used to drive the tuning strategy for flow rates, purity analyzers and temperatures.”

Economic optimization also can be driven by real-time pricing updates to determine the next moves for increased profitability. “The profit objective function equals production realizations minus feed costs minus opportunity costs. The realizations are treat gas purged to the fuel-gas system, yield upgrade incentives at high-margin hydrotreaters and steam generation. Feed costs are third-party hydrogen-purchase feeds to a hydrogen plant. The operating costs are furnace-fuel gas, steam and electricity, for example, to drive major compressors.”

A real-time system also automates on-line implemen-tation, handles operating exceptions and presents an advisory option to operations and technical. The underly-ing regulatory controls work together with the hydrogen system real-time optimizer (RTO) to handle a large num-ber of constraints. “User interfaces and work processes facilitate day-to-day cooperation of operators, process en-gineers, planners and controls engineers,” added Andrei. “This system affects the whole refinery.”

RTO carries out optimization and coordinated constraint control tasks. “It benefits mechanisms by keeping the hydrogen system feasible and optimized in response to ongoing disturbances, by balancing the purchase or pro-duction of hydrogen vs. additional purging to fuel gas, by optimizing compression costs, by ensuring hydrotreaters receive optimum hydrogen purity and by providing open-loop, off-line benefits,” said Andrei. Z


Refinery Hydrogen Poses Optimization Challenge

“Hydrogen producers are disturbances or opportunities--they are things you have to live with.” ExxonMobil’s Marco Andrei explored the ins and outs of refinery hydrogen flow optimization.

Handling changes to process applications is never particularly easy, but when safety gets involved, it’s a whole other ball game. Properly managing all the needs, variables and requirements inherent in altering any process safety system takes a calm, logical and almost obsessively methodical and well-documented approach. This is needed to overcome the uncertainties and potential dangers that can arise when high-stakes applications are maintained, repaired, up-dated or replaced.

“Hazards involve equipment failures, hu-man errors, unforeseen chemical reactions or any situation that increases operating risk, such as potential deficiencies in safety management systems. Hazards can be introduced when change occurs, when mod-ifications to a facility’s operation are made, or when replacement equipment doesn’t meet the design criteria of equipment being replaced,” said Ulric Roy, Invensys Operations Management’s lead engineer for Triconex safety systems, at a presentation this week at the Invensys North America Cli-ent Conference in Houston. “Other changes occur when operating procedures are modi-fied, site staffing changes, or a company reorganizes. Changes that aren’t carefully controlled increase operating risk and can di-rectly cause or lead to catastrophic events.”

To help eliminate or mitigate these risks, make sure new hazards aren’t introduced and ensure that human and environmen-tal safety aren’t compromised, Roy said. “Consistent and effective management of change (MOC) is the most important ele-ment of the process safety management (PSM) program. It’s the most difficult activ-ity to implement, and it requires solid dedi-cation from highly experienced resources and rigorous management commitment.”

“Management of change is not a form.

It’s a process.” Invensys’ Ulric Roy explained how change management methodolo-gies work to fulfill OSHA’s process safety management requirements. Roy added that maturation of MOC programs in industry has been very slow, but today there is more sup-port that inspires confidence. “For the past 20 years, most of the initial chemical industry MOC implementation activity has been driv-en by regulatory influence,” said Roy. “Since 1989, a lot of industry experience and guide-lines have been developed, and computer technology has helped garner acceptance of new tools, like the risk-based process safety

(RBPS) system approach. However, the crucial element is reliable performance. Your MOC process should be flexible and aim for ways to continuously improve.”

Roy explained that a MOC process is an organized, systematic effort that includes administrative procedures for the review and approval of changes before they are imple-mented. “Your PSM program shall define the MOC elements in detail. You define where the MOC process applies—the physical areas of the facilities, such as fence-to-fence,

the phases of the process life cycle and the source of changes, such as hardware, software, procedures, personnel or organiza-tion,” he said. “A MOC process should be designed to fit your organizational structure, culture and workforce, and it should be revised periodically to ensure adaptability.”

However, Roy cautioned that a MOC process that is circumvented or used in a parallel environment with no widespread acceptance and commitment is worse than having no MOC process. “An effective MOC process demands a significant commitment from line management, departmental sup-port organizations and employees,” said Roy. “Success begins at the top, when manage-ment demonstrates leadership and commit-ment by making sometimes-hard decisions in favor of safety.”

To manage risk by eliminating it, Roy described MOC’s main goals as:

• Eliminate MOC deficiencies in safety management systems.

• Reduce quantity and magnitude of risks.

• Expand MOC into each phase of the process life cycle.

• Expand MOC into non-traditional changes.

• Make the MOC process more fault-tolerant and resilient to circumvention or human error.

• Reduce the number of PSM audit findings.

• Monitor MOC performance on-site and from a central location, where resources are specialized and cost-effective.

• Achieve better MOC results with fewer resources, if possible.

To accomplish these goals, Roy added that users must manage a variety of types of changes in their process applications. These

types include changes to process equip-ment, process controls, safety systems, site infrastructure, operations and technol-ogy, preventive inspection maintenance, procedures and staffing. Likewise, they also must use MOC in each life-cycle phase of their equipment, application or facility. These phases include R&D, conceptual, design, de-tailed engineering design, procurement and construction, start-up (atypical operation), normal operation (typical operation), mainte-nance and turnaround, extended shutdown (atypical operation) and decommissioning.

“MOC is not a form. It’s a process,” said Roy. The seven steps in the MOC process include:

• An employee originates a request for change (RFC).

• PSM personnel independent of the RFC originator review the request to identify potential risks (adverse impacts) and list the process safety information (PSI) elements that may need modification.

• Based on this review, a facility man-ager approves or rejects the change.

• If the change is approved, it’s imple-mented.

• The PSI is modified to reflect the change.

• Before start-up of the change, affected personnel are informed and trained if necessary.

These activities must be completed prior to pre-start-up safety review (PSSR).

“The MOC process is the gatekeeper—a trackable sign-on/sign-off sheet—of most other documents,” added Roy. “But you define where the MOC process applies in your PSM program, as well as the phases of the process life cycle, and the source of changes, such as from hardware, software, procedures, personnel or organization.” Z


Managing Change to Follow OSHA-PSM Standard

“Management of change is not a form. It’s a process.” Invensys’ Ulric Roy explained how change manage-ment methodologies work to fulfill OSHA’s process safety management requirements.

highlights of the 2009 invensys north america client conference - … · 2013. 6. 15. ·...

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