Eberhart out at IPS

Invensys Process Solutions (IPS) president and chief executive Paulett Eberhart is out after two years on the job. Her last day was 8 January.
Ulf Henriksson, Invensys chief executive, will step in as acting president and chief executive of IPS.
“I would like to thank Paulett for her efforts over the past two years and wish her every success in the future. The company is in good shape to deal with the current global economic uncertainties, and our strong financial position allows us to continue to invest in the business to position it as a leader in helping clients improve their business efficiency.
“We remain committed to our business strategy and will cement our position as a premier technology solutions provider. I look forward to working with the IPS team as we accelerate our implementation of this strategy and increase the value we can bring to our clients,” Henriksson said.
Eberhart’s goal was to transform IPS into a huge automation industry solution provider, and this past year she kicked off a program at the company’s user group meeting in Dallas to announce the new initiative. That meeting celebrated a company whose roots go back 100 years.
“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,” Eberhart said at the time. “We are moving to become an integrated solutions company.”
In her keynote address, Eberhart said she knew from the first day she started at IPS that the old way of doing things was just not going to fly.
“I found when I got here, we had a huge amount 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 [together] 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.”
At the time when Eberhart started, “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.”