Rarely does an executive of an industrial automation company appear at ease, confident, even giddy when it comes to the competitive landscape, but that's exactly the posture that John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management, takes these days.
"Business is great," he beamed during a recent meeting with Managing Automation at Emerson Global Users Exchange, the company's annual user conference. "Order run rates are 19% to 20% above last year, shipments are 15% [above last year's]... and we have a lot of momentum going into next year."
Berra's excitement stems not from what he says is double-digit growth in major product segments, or the accolades that underscore the company's customer-centric philosophy -- such as a leadership award from Frost & Sullivan for customer service in South East Asia, or a reader's-choice award from Chemical Processing magazine as the "Best Technology Provider" for the third consecutive year. Rather, Berra is an engineer at heart, and his company just made a technological leap in field device measurement that would make the most rigid plant manager a little weak in the knees.
Emerson's in-plant Smart Wireless solution, announced in October, extends the company's PlantWeb architecture -- a wired web of digital predictive analysis and asset management for control systems, valves, and rotating machinery -- into the realm of the air waves.
The company is no stranger to wireless -- it has an existing portfolio of applications that supports mobile operators by sending an alert to a cell phone or PDA, for example. But the latest launch is based on a wireless mesh network architecture, a self-organizing technology composed of sensors on instruments that transmit to a gateway, which integrates with Emerson's AMS Suite, the predictive maintenance and asset optimization aspect of PlantWeb.
Emerson has been in field trials with the wireless mesh technology for three years, working primarily with BP to equip hard-to-reach instruments with intelligent sensors. Right off the bat, BP experienced a 90% cost reduction by eliminating wires, according to BP senior technology consultant David Lafferty during a press event at Emerson Exchange. BP began testing the wireless technology on the bearing temperature of a fan. The technology wasn't meant for operational purposes -- as it was still in a pilot program -- but after it found a fan that was running too hot, and BP verified it through manual measurements, the staff was hooked.
"Once you get this wireless stuff in place, it's like throwing raw meat into a piranha tank," Lafferty said. "It just gets consumed right away." Now, the biggest problem Lafferty has is prioritizing projects.
Emerson begins its wireless rollout in North America, with global expansion and more products being folded into the in-plant Smart Wireless infrastructure in 2007. So far, observers are upbeat. "There's a whole lot of end users pulling for these kinds of products," says Harry Forbes, an analyst at ARC Advisory Group.
No wonder Berra is smiling.
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Managing Automation.