Emerson product development: It’s all about ease of use

At the end of the day, your product is only as good as a user makes it and Emerson wants to make sure their systems are easy to use from top to bottom.
That is why, in collaboration with Carnegie Melon University, Emerson created what it calls Human Centered Design Institute.
This comes after more than five years of user analysis. The goal is to make products that work, but also bring about a significant improvement in ease-of-use and workforce productivity.
“We are introducing a completely new overhaul of how we develop new products,” said Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management during the Emerson Global Users Exchange in Orlando, Fla. “A process that puts features second, and usability first. A process that reinvents the relationship between technology and the people that use it. We call this concept human centered design. It puts you in charge of the technology instead of the other away around. The institute is to make sure we build products based on usability.”
At user group meetings suppliers always talk about listening to users, but Emerson feels they are taking it one step further.
“I don’t think the issue is we have ignored customers up to five years ago,” said John Berra, chairman of Emerson Process Management. “I think we spent most of our time on the technological time of customer input and a little less time on the ease of use side. Our customers used to have the ability to buy a small DeltaV set it up in a conference room and play around with it and the people inside the customer organization would figure out how to use it and that knowledge was then transferred internally,” Berra said. “All those folks are now gone.”
“Now the emphasis on making it easy to use became overwhelming and we started to pay attention to that when our customers lost the ability to figure it out for themselves.”
“It is a new approach,” Sonnenberg said. “Before we thought our job was to make a product better. But now we don’t just look at the product, we look at all the processes customers are using right now.”
The design of Emerson’s new DeltaV S series followed along the path of the human centered design and so did their new 50 new field device dashboards.
These new field device dashboards interact with a series of smart devices which gives the operator a clear and easy way to understand what the device readings are and how well the devices are operating.
“This all starts with the customer and ends with the customer,” Sonnenberg said.

Emerson’s new DeltaV

Emerson’s DeltaV has always been a solid, consistent system that has worked in the automation industry for years.
But Emerson now believes the new DeltaV S series platform is a game changer or something they refer to as being able to conquer complexity.
With plants getting larger and more complex and the technology becoming more intense and accelerating, systems need to be easy to operate and very intuitive.
“It is almost the perfect storm with plants getting larger and more complex,” said Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management at the Emerson Global Users Exchange in Orlando, Fla. “With 40% of the workforce at retirement age next year in the industry and with the economy, it has increased this percentage with employee reductions.”
This new release focuses on Emerson’s commitment to end users. “The people issue is getting more important moving forward,” Sonnenberg said.
During these difficult times it is easy to hide under a rock and wait until things blow over, but Sonnenberg said they have been consistently working on research and development to come out of this recession hitting the ground running.
“You can become too focused on your products, but then you can become blind to opportunities on how customers do their jobs,” said Peter Zornio, chief technology officer at Emerson Process.
This new DeltaV S series includes enhancements to all of the systems’ I/O processing, operator displays, asset management, batch capability and system security, Zornio said. The idea behind these new capabilities is to reduce user project complexity, eliminate needless work, and speed system commissioning. This is a simple case of time is money.
Some of the advances in the new system are I/O on demand and electronic marshalling.
With I/O on demand, users decide what type of I/O they want, whether it is wireless, Foundation Fieldbus, HART, AI, AO, DI, DO, DP, T/C, or RTD, Zornio said.
They decide when they want the I/O, whether for late project changes, during start-up, during operation, or temporary installations; and where they want the I/O, whether in a rack room, remote locations, hazardous areas, safety systems, or harsh environments.
Electronic marshalling can eliminate up to two-thirds of the wiring and connections needed by conventional marshalling cabinets.
The new technology that goes with the S-series, called single channel CHARacterization ModuleS (CHARMS), eliminates the need for users to wire I/O to specific controller I/O cards.
This provides single channel integrity and flexibility down to the channel level.
Being flexible is also one other aspect of this new offering. Traditional project engineering requires major time and cost in changing rack-room I/O wiring and terminations as engineers refine the design during project execution and construction, electronic marshalling makes changes easy and eliminates re-wiring. The user can land the field wires, place a new CHARM and electronically marshal it wherever needed. No more need to rewire which would be a costly delay, Zornio said.
“We have made some major step changes in how a project can be done,” Zornio said.

New DeltaV, new processes at Emerson

Steve Sonnenberg sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
Part of that light might come from the new DeltaV.
“This is the biggest advancement in control I/O,” said Sonnenberg, Emerson Process Management’s president and Business Leader during his keynote address at Emerson Global Users Exchange today in Orlando, Fla. “This is control system hardware that lets you finalize your I/O design once you finish your process design. Imagine significant reductions in change orders. Imagine eliminating spaghetti wiring, eliminating miles of multi-core cabling, and thousand of tedious hours of landing I/O. Imagine changing your mind and not getting penalized for it.”
Fighting through the global recession, the new DeltaV is a big push at this year’s user group.
“Emerson process has been affected by this downturn. We feel our business is starting to bottom out and the predictions are for next year 2010 will be a recovery, albeit a slow recovery,” Sonnenberg said.
During this downturn the company has built new facilities, made acquisitions, and worked through research and development to develop new products in addition to DeltaV.
“One of my personal favorites is wireless,” Sonnenberg said. One of those products is something called the THUM.
“The THUM is a product that can wirelessly enable existing wired products. It is estimated there is 26 million HART devices in the field today and this smart wireless THUM will free the diagnostic information trapped inside these devices.”
All the products all boil down to one thing: Getting more information or data out to short staff organizations.
“There is a huge knowledge void in mature markets because of people walking out of the door because of layoffs or retirement,” Sonnenberg said. “Plant jobs have become less specialized and more generalized.”
“We also hear frequently, ‘how can we mange all the data coming from your automation systems. What we really want is for you to convert the data to information that can help us make decisions.’ ”
“He also hear ‘with fewer people and more work to get done we need to try to eliminate unnecessary work and processes.’ ”
“We hear from customers, ‘your technology and your competitor’s technology is great but sometimes you move faster than we can actually absorb it. Sometimes the training involved can be daunting and sometimes the number of steps required to complete a routine task can be cumbersome.’ ”
Emerson learned something from those messages.
“The truth is the automation technologies developed over the past 30 years weren’t developed based on work practices, they were developed upon product features. The vast majority of our advances have been around technology features without how users interact with the technologies and how these products are used. Products sometimes present as many challenges as they do solutions.”
Emerson said part of their evolution is they are approaching technology development in a different way.
“First think about how and why customers use the product and then design that product for the optimal user experience,” Sonnenberg said.

Virtual reality becoming real at Invensys

Who says the gaming and automation industries don’t have anything in common?
If you talk to the Invensys folks, they feel they have a hit with their virtual reality training software called EYESim.
Taking the gaming skill sets popular today, EYESim combines virtual reality technologies with high-fidelity process and control simulation, computer-based maintenance and documentation management and other applications.
The end result is a realistic representation of a plant that can provide a safe training environment for workers to increase operating efficiency and skills.
During a demonstration of the product at the Invensys North America Client Conference in Houston, the company showed how it could be a useful tool to help train workers today. But down the road, Dr. Tobias Scheele, vice president of advanced applications at Invensys, said this could be the future of control rooms.
“With experienced workers with their institutional knowledge (leaving the industry), we need to bring the problem to the experts, not the expert to the problem,” he said.
“This is just the starting point,” Scheele said. “The control room of the future should not be flat. Why not use virtual reality to aggregate information to virtualize the information.”
In short, to get a working profile of a plant, Invensys goes and takes a boat load of digital photos and then meshes them together to form the virtual plant.
The company then takes the DYNSIM high-fidelity process simulator, FSIM Plus software, I/A Series control system emulation and some other programs and creates a computer-generated representation of a plant.
With a headset, workers then enter a completely immersive environment in which they can move throughout the plant. They can control valves, check gauge readings and even work through an emergency situation.
With the use of avatars, it is possible to investigate the maintainability of process machinery at the plant, said Invensys’ Director of Global Consulting Maurizio Rovaglio.
“Virtual reality helps with the training in the field. It is possible to train on different types of accidents,” he said.
While it may seem easy to dismiss a virtual reality program as just a gimmick, but this product line has some great potential for Invensys.

USAir flight 1549: Adhering to procedures, teamwork mean success

The ultimate in teamwork and following policy and procedures really comes to light when you listen to Jeff Skiles talk about USAirways flight 1459.
Skiles, the first officer of the ill-fated flight that took off from New York’s LaGuardia 15 January that hit a flock of Canadian Geese, talked during today’s keynote address at the Invensys North America Client Conference all about the key components of teamwork, training and following policies and procedures.
“These basic building blocks of training, teamwork and procedures we use in the cockpit are critical for any profession where human beings interact,” Skiles said.
The pilots and flight attendants on a team are a team based on training over the years.
“We know exactly what we are responsible for and can rely upon each other,” he said.
The following is an excerpted timeline in the take off of flight 1549:
“We started our day that day in Pittsburgh went to Charlotte and then flew to New York. There was a weather delay as we taxied out to the runway. This was my first trip on an Airbus.
“It was a cold day in New York. I set the controls for the takeoff. We were late and the passengers were worried about making their connections. It was the last day of our leg and was the last flight of our day. I had just met Sully three days before at the beginning of our leg. In our business, it is our training and our strict adherence to procedure that allow us to act as a team from the very first leg we fly together.
“I was flying this leg. The control tower cleared us for take off. We started moving. We were working as a team and we know exactly what we are responsible for and what we can depend on the other pilot for.
“At 400 feet I rolled the plane to the left. At 3,000 feet in the air, I pitched the airplane over to accelerate to 250 knots, our speed limit below 10,000 feet. At this moment I see a line of geese right in front of the nose. They are too close to maneuver around, but I felt this great sense of relief that I saw we flew over the top of them, which we did in the cockpit. But we didn’t clear them enough as it sounded like hail hitting the airplane and both engines immediately rolled back to idle.
“We are not in good shape and I am pushing the nose over the keep the plane flying. Sully immediately took over the airplane.
“We are gliding. We are trading air speed for altitude to keep the plane from stalling. The plane is losing about 1,000 feet per minute, but we are only at 3,000 feet to start with. Sully and I tried to assess what we have got here.
“I reset the computers speed information making sure we had electric and hydraulic power and test to restart the engines. Our options were to either go back to LaGuardia, or Teterboro or the Hudson River. Our only real option was the Hudson River. What I remember most as we descended into the river was the noise. We have a large selection of bells, horns, automated voices that warn us of various aircraft system failures. It seemed like every alert was going off at once. Sully had the presence of mind to pick up the PA and give the command to the flight attendants to brace for impact. That was the only knowledge they had of what was going to happen.
“After we landed in the water, one of the great things about our success was our passengers. They were professional passengers.”
Skiles said after they got back onshore and the politicians got on the scene, “(New York) Governor (David) Paterson coined the phrase the ‘Miracle on the Hudson.’ But was it really a miracle? What allowed the two of us to perform so well was our training, our teamwork, and our procedures.”
In short, Skiles said the crew, while not really knowing each other, knew just what to do.
“Because of training and procedures we knew what to do when the birds flew into the engines,” he said. “Flight crews work more like a baseball team rather than a traditional top down management approach. Every person has a roll, a responsibility. That is why we can work together as a team from the first moment we sit down together even if we have never met.”
“Other than hitting the birds, everything went our way – and they had to go our way,” Skiles said.

Invensys: Teamwork key to moving forward

Even in a perfect world, getting through today’s tough economic times is difficult at best.
But if you don’t have teamwork helping guide everyone through, then it is almost impossible. That point was clearly evident at today’s opening keynote at the Invensys North American Client Conference in Houston, Texas.
“Today is all about delivering consistency and follow through day-by-day to keep your business running and profitable,” said Steve Blair, president North America for Invensys Operations Management.
He added technology alone is not the answer. Rather, is giving that technology to people so they can make informed decisions to they can “obtain sustainable achievements.”
“Sustainable performance is achievable to those who lead,” Blair said. “We prefer to lead.”
In talking about team work, ExxonMobil Chemical’s CSR leader, Ken Anderson, knows all about it. After Hurricane Ike tore through Galveston, Texas, 12 September last year, the ExxonMobil Beaumont Chemical Plant was devastated. The plant, located about 35 miles away from Galveston, had a storm surge of 12 feet which completely flooded the massive plant.
He had to come in and get the wiped out control system for the plant up and running. He said it was a category 2 hurricane with a category 4 storm surge. In other words, the plant was flooded with salt water and he had to get a team together to get it up and running because this was the only site that produced some of the key chemical for some of ExxonMobil’s key products.
“On day three or day four we came out with a document I worked on from my pick up truck as that was the only real place I could sit down and work,” Anderson said. “The principal thought behind this guiding principles document was to clearly spell out what we were going to do and what we were not going to do.”
Anderson pointed out some success factors to get a team up and running in a crises situation:
• Clear chain of command and clear criterion of decision making
• Unambiguous roles and responsibilities
• Inter and intra team communication
• Specified boundaries on work scope
• Indentify true schedule of critical activities
• Direct contact with our suppliers
• Short shipping orders expedited control system recovery and commissioning
• Offsite systems staging decoupled and control system recovery from parallel onsite recovery work.
Anderson said the plant was back up and running and producing product by early December just a few short months after the hurricane flooded out the plant. He said that never could have happened if they didn’t have a clear policy and procedure plan in place. But in addition, they needed people working together to accomplish the goal.