19 June 2008

Honeywell unplugged

When you think of Honeywell these days, what is the first thing you think of? Is it as a DCS player? Or maybe it is their involvement in wireless?

If you ask Honeywell, they want to be known as an integrated main automation contractor (I-MAC)—a big solution provider.

“The earlier we come in with partners, the more predictable the project will become,” said Jack Bolick, president of Honeywell Process Solutions during his keynote address this week before 700 attendees at the Honeywell Users Group Americas Symposium 2008 in Phoenix, Ariz.

Honeywell wants to focus on lifecycle sustainability, long-term asset safety reliability and efficiency, Bolick said.

“Open systems are a little bit of a different animal compared to proprietary systems,” Bolick said. “Open systems need to be utilized across the enterprise,” not just at the plant.

Any time anyone from Honeywell talks, eventually the discussion leads to wireless. Today was no different. Honeywell unveiled an updated version of its OneWireless industrial wireless network equipment designed to be compatible with the ISA100.11a industrial wireless communication standard.

OneWireless is a mesh network with ISA100-ready hardware. When the standard becomes official, they can upgrade it with an over-the-air software update.

“Wireless is a major inflection point,” Bolick said. “Wireless is an enabler. You can pick up data quicker and cheaper.”

Meanwhile, end users have a say when it comes to product development at Honeywell.

Customer advisory boards give huge advice for products, said Harsh Chitale, vice president of strategy and marketing at Honeywell during a press conference during the user group.

Chitale cited four examples where end users aided Honeywell in getting products updated and out the door. The four product lines were the safety manager, Experion, POMSnet and POMStrace, and the Uniformance Process Studios.

“These products were developed along with customers and then went through trials at customer plants,” Chitale said.

One of the product line improvements vetted by end users is the updated version of Safety Manager, the company’s safety instrumented system (SIS).

This latest version of Safety Manager, which integrates with the company’s Experion Process Knowledge System, allows safety and process controllers to communicate with each other without depending on intermediate interfaces such as PCs, and without compromising operations security or data integrity.

In sharing critical information between Safety Manager and the Experion C300 process controller, the system can provide plant-wide SIS point data, diagnostics, and system information, as well as alarms and events, operator displays, and sequence of event information to any station in a plant.

Another product line a customer advisory board had input on was the enhanced version of the Experion system that allows plant operators to coordinate process control, safety shutdown, and fire and gas mitigation steps.

—Gregory Hale