Wireless is defining change in automation

“Basically all I’ve ever done in my professional life is get rid of wires,” joked John Berra, chairman of Emerson Process Management.
He delivered the keynote address Monday morning at the Emerson Global Users Exchange in National Harbor, Maryland.
His keynote was a “state-of-the-union” on Emerson (very healthy), a farewell to his leadership role in the company, and an introduction to the new head of Emerson Process, Steven Sonnenberg.
He harkened back to his first job at a Monsanto chemical plant startup at the beginning of his career and nearly 40 years ago. “It was new and had analogue instrumentation and I remember being overwhelmed by the number of wires … everywhere.”
Fast forward to the present day and the explosion of wireless, the main theme of the meeting, and it’s infusion into many parts of the plant. “I’m more excited about wireless than any technical advance I’ve seen in my engineering career,” he said. “Twenty percent of measurements will someday use wireless monitoring.”
He sees the standard for automation wireless is set because 16 of the largest companies in the instrumentation domain accept and use WirelessHART, products are now shipping that leverage WirelessHART, and the IEC (International Electrotechnic Commission) has accepted WirelessHART as a Publicly Available Specification (IEC/PAS 62591Ed. 1). A PAS, according to the IEC web site, “is a normative document that represents a consensus among experts. A simple majority of the participating members of a technical committee or subcommittee approve the document. An IEC-PAS responds to an urgent market need for such a normative document and is designed to bring the work of industry consortia into the realm of the IEC.”
“Is there any reason to talk about anything else?” he asked.
– Nicholas Sheble

Emerson Process names new president

John Berra, the face and voice of Emerson Process Management for years is relinquishing control of the day-to-day operations to focus more on strategic planning.
Steven A. Sonnenberg will become executive vice president of Emerson and president of Emerson Process Management.
“I’m not retiring, but I now have an opportunity to return to my first love, technology,” he told 2,000 people during his keynote address at the Emerson Global Users Exchange in National Harbor, Maryland on Monday. “I am going to pass the leadership on to Steve Sonnenberg who moved to China with his family in the 1980s and it wasn’t the China you know today that you saw in the Olympics. “He built the Emerson Asia organization as we have it today. He is a tireless proponent of wireless.”
“I will stay on as chairman of Emerson Process Management to concentrate on strategic planning, technology and customer relations.”
These are big shoes to fill,” Sonnenberg said. “How can I be successful? How can I improve on our present formula? I don’t think I can; our numbers are too positive. If I can continue making our customers successful, everything will be fine.”
Sonnenberg joined Emerson in 1979 as a marketing analyst with Brooks Instrument. He took on marketing and general management positions in Germany, London and Asia Pacific. In 2000, Sonnenberg was appointed president of Emerson Process Management Asia Pacific and in 2002, he was appointed president of Rosemount.
Sonnenberg holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Georgia Tech and a master of business administration from University of Virginia.
Other changes at Emerson Process Management include:
Michael H. Train, currently president of Emerson Process Management Asia Pacific, will become president of Rosemount and will return to the United States from Singapore. In addition, Sabee Mitra, currently president of Emerson Process Management Middle East will now be president of Emerson Process Management Asia Pacific and will move to Singapore.
David A. Tredinnick, who is now vice president Southeast Asia for Emerson Process Management Asia Pacific, will move to Dubai and replace Mitra as President of Emerson Process Management Middle East.
Larry W. Flatt will replace the retiring Gene Shanahan as group vice president for the Emerson Process Management Flow Group.
-- Nicholas Sheble

Different paths to innovation

Make no mistake about it, if a company is going to succeed today and grow in the future it has to innovate.
If you ask Jan Baan what it takes to innovate, it is simple, it is within his DNA.
If you ask Peter Skarzynski, what it takes, it takes a plan and a change in mindset for a company to allow innovation.
Either way, it has to happen. That what this morning’s keynoters said during MESA’s 2008 plant-to-plant enterprise conference in Orlando, Fla.
“I have found the maximum innovation time for a company is 20 years,” said Baan, the executive chairman and chief executive of Cordys and founder of The Baan Co., the maker of Baan ERP software. “After that, innovation is called M&A, mergers and acquisition.”
“At Baan, we moved from product driven to customer driven,” Baan said. “Then we made the biggest mistake when we went with an IPO – then we became shareholder driven.”
It won’t be too long, Baan said, before BPM (business process management) will replace or supplant ERP software.
ERP is database driven, but BPM encompasses other aspects of the business, like the human element, Baan said. “We want to bring the human element into the flow.”
To change into a BPM mindset, it will take quite a bit of change. However, the technology is there, it is just a matter of finding some agents of change to push and then everyone will start to fall in line, Baan said.
“Information is power,” Baan said. “The industrial age was all about mass production. The customer age is about mass customization.”
That type of change is hard to envision, but you have to have leaders that foster innovation.
“How do you innovate when past performance does not guarantee future success?” asked Skarzynski, managing director at industry consultant Strategos.
“Innovation is a term that is thrown about and used very casually,” he said. “Maybe it is overhyped. But the future doesn’t just happen, it is created.”
He added there is a 96% failure rate on innovated products, but that does not mean a company should give up.
“It is hard. It is difficult. In many organizations innovation is often suppressed,” he said. “Dare to be radical. Does(innovation)have the power to change customer expectations? Radical does not have to risky,” Skarzynski said.
He listed seven areas needed to innovate:
1) Listen to those closest to the problem
2) Encourage, teach and support new perspectives
3) Challenge industry orthodoxies, the rules governing the marketplace
4) Harness emerging trends; make the entrepreneurial spirit part of your company’s DNA
5) Address the unarticulated needs
6) Look up and down the value chain
7) Leverage know how – yours and others
Creating an innovative environment “is all about the culture of the organization,” Skarzynski said. “To create innovation you have to find the impediments and find the enablers.”

Information will make you king

It’s all about information. It is about creating it, getting it, understanding it, giving it, using it, and then learning from it.
“The world is changing and our society and economy are being shaped by a new era called globality,” said Matt Bauer, chairman of MESA during this morning’s opening keynote address at the 2008 Plant-to-enterprise conference in Orlando, Fla. “Globality is defined as the totally interconnected marketplace; one that is not hampered by time, political or geographic boundaries. The same technological progress that makes globality possible is driving a revolution in manufacturing.”
While that seems like another way of saying we are living in a global world, it does, but it has a different spin that manufacturers should listen to.
“Manufacturers have a new strategic imperative,” Bauer said. “They must do more and go faster if they are going to survive and thrive in tomorrow’s world. It is no longer about productivity and agility. They must innovate. Innovation is all about bringing together new ideas, new concepts and capabilities in unique ways. It’s about manipulating the established to create something new.”
Saying companies need to be innovative can sound like a tired cliché, but in fact the point has to be hammered home time after time.
“Determining when and where to innovate is still pretty hard,” Bauer said. “Our perception of what is possible is biased. It is biased by a predisposition by something called linear thinking. Linear thinking is sequential; it is one step at a time, it is a predictable series of logical conclusions. No big changes. It is really about basing your idea of tomorrow only on the information you have today.”
From a positive viewpoint, the way to get ahead is to shove aside that way of thinking and force the organization to move forward.
“We must stop thinking of innovation in terms of today,” Bauer said. “We cannot allow ourselves to be limited by the perception of what is possible. Just because we don’t know how to do something today, it doesn’t mean we won’t tomorrow.”
While a linear thinker may have problems learning to think that way, if that model does not change, it could mean a huge disaster for a company.
“Technology was the backbone of the industrial revolution,” Bauer said. It gave us speed to market through automation. It also fostered a silo’d approach to business process and organizations that are contrary to the demands of globality today. The next revolution in manufacturing will be built on information. Where manufacturing enterprises create value to a network of relationships and where response time becomes a strategic advantage. We need to operate in a totally interconnected marketplace using a unified communications approach.”
By using that approach, enterprises will be able to respond it real time.
“Information created a new foundation for manufacturing enterprises,” Bauer said. “Information readily available from any source in real time and in context can connect the dots and supercharge our innovation capabilities.
Dr. Peter Williams, chief technology officer for Big Green Innovations at IBM, agrees.
People are surprised to hear IBM is involved in the water industry, Williams said. The funny thing is, they found the main issues in the water industry had absolutely nothing to do with water.
“If you look at problems in the water sector, it is based on information,” Williams said. “We bring information management to water management.”
It’s all about information. It is about creating it, getting it, understanding it, giving it, using it, and then learning from it.

An Invensys makeover

It is hard to imagine a company whose roots go back 100 years to look and feel like a startup, but that is exactly what Invensys is looking like these days.
“If you take our manufacturing and automation heritage and add to that our business performance expertise and bring that together as a set of integrated solutions, we believe we have something that is unavailable anywhere else,” said Paulett Eberhart, president and chief executive of Invensys Process Systems (IPS) this morning during her keynote address at the IPS North American Client Conference in Dallas. “We are moving to become an integrated solutions company.”
With Invensys’ subsidiary Foxboro turning 100 years old this year, Eberhart knew from the first day she started 18 months ago the old way of doing things was just not going to fly.
“I found when I got here we had a huge amounts of capabilities and industry knowledge but we kind of had it scattered everywhere around the globe,” she said. “It was hard to know who had what knowledge and expertise and how we can bring that all together. We are now focused on how we can bring all that industry knowledge and technical capability and general business knowledge and how to bring that all together from a client’s perspective. And how to work with clients to uncover opportunities and issues and problems they are having.”
When Eberhart first started at IPS, she found a company that seemed focused internally and not out toward customers.
“We were very product focused, and we will continue to build and develop and invest in those products, but we also have capabilities we can bring in terms of service that can mean a total solution for our client.”
“We need to take a holistic view of solutions,” said Steve Blair, president of IPS North America. “In the past we looked at solutions on an individual basis and not with a holistic view. We need to look at solutions from cradle to grave. We need to talk about building relationships with clients, not about getting the next sale.”
When it really comes down to it, the end user does not care about what it takes for the supplier to end up getting the job done. The user just wants the job done.
Eberhart said in one of her first meetings with a client, they said for Invensys to continue getting their business, they have to “make it easy for us to business with you and you have got to be able to deliver global projects seamlessly around the globe.”
“We want to leverage our knowledge and skills, but also (the users’) knowledge and skills,” she said.
“Solutions are about the full lifecycle,” Blair said. “It’s about starting the process. It’s about how you operate your plant and it’s about how you optimize it.
This is about making sure we are maintaining our relationship with clients,” he said.
The old days of Invensys just selling products to end users are gone.
“Our existing products are important to us, but we want to continue to deliver improvement and use our entire portfolio to target solutions and partnerships," Blair said. "Fundamentally, we want IPS to work differently with our clients. We want to build up a client care model. We want to have a business conversation and we want a consultative interaction. We don’t want to wait for an RFQ. We want to get involved with you ahead of time to understand your problems and offer potential solutions in partnership with you.”