Emerson and the Integration of Process and Discrete Automation – Automation World

In 2015, Emerson repositioned its portfolio of technologies and services around two business platformsCommercial & Residential Solutions and Automation Solutions. Obviously, our interest is in the Automation Solutions division, formerly known as Emerson Process Management. This change in name has proven to be more than just a corporate branding initiative. Its a message of intent surrounding Emersons role as an automation technology supplier.

This new direction for Emerson became more evident in 2017 when Emerson made bids to acquire Rockwell Automation. Though this acquisition attempt did not pan out, just a year later the company acquired GE Intelligent Platformsgiving Emerson access to an array of discrete industry automation technologies.

Considering Emersons long history as a process industry-oriented company, Automation World met with Peter Zornio (pictured at left in image accompanying this article), Emersons CTO, and Stuart Harris, group president of Emersons new Digital Transformation business, to get a better understanding of the companys changing position in the industrial automation market.

This is a conscious effort to expand into discrete industries, said Zornio, describing how Emersons repositioning in 2015 provided the company an opportunity to focus on automation and enable it to serve as big a space as possible. He noted that Emersons discrete industry technology acquisitions are part of a two-fold strategy to build discrete solutions aimed at factory automation and take them into hybrid manufacturing. Were not going to ignore bringing that [discrete technologies] into process and hybrid.

From a business point of view, our strengths have been in the process and hybrid industries, added Harris. But weve interfaced with PLCs for a long time around specific applications, such as high-speed control. Having the GE PLC gives us a control platform in the discrete space. We see this (the GE Intelligent Platforms acquisition) as an opportunity to connect islands of automation. He also noted that Emersons recent acquisition of Aventics, along with the companys acquisition of ASCO in 1985, have also provided the company with a number of instrumentation technologies for the discrete industries.

Zornio pointed out that the two worlds of industry (process and discrete) are becoming more technologically close than they were 30 years ago. This reality is behind Emerson plan to bring PLC control into its DeltaV distributed control system (DCS) for applications such as compressor control.

When it comes to approaching control from a process or discrete automation point of view, Zornio said, the biggest difference is in the software design. Are you designing a system from the beginning to have everything in an integrated suite that cant be taken apart easily? If so, thats a DCS with a single database. Discrete automation is the opposite, where best in class componentssuch as controls and historiansare selected and then knitted together. We broke the mold in this area with the DeltaV PK controller, as this controller can be part of an integrated DCS suite or be taken out of the DCS and run stand-alone on a machine.

Zornio noted that, as important as DCS technology is to the process industries, 90% of control in a refinery is not done in a DCS. They have lots of packaged units that use PLCs, like the PK controller.

The fact that refineries dont need high-speed motion controls is a big reason why the PK controller was not developed to address applications such as robotics or high-speed packaging applications. This capability gap, coupled with Emersons intent to broaden its reach into the batch and discrete industries, was a factor behind Emersons acquisition of GE Intelligent Platforms.

Further explaining the broadening of Emersons reach as a technology supplier, Zornio said there are two major shifts the company is focusing on: expanding its presence in the automation space and Digital Transformation. At its core, Digital Transformationand the creation of the Emerson business focused on thisis putting us into different space. This is more software oriented and incorporates pervasive sensing, but its also more app oriented around things like reliability, safety, and energy use. So, in some ways, it was more natural for us to expand horizontally in automation (as the company did with its GE Intelligent Platforms acquisition); the bigger leap for us is into software, data integration, and connection with ERP systems.

Facing the growth required by Emerson to play in the bigger automation space its targeting, Harris observed that Emersons PlantWeb architecture, first introduced in 1997, already addresses many of these [digital transformation] concepts around instrumentation and rotating equipment. Now were looking to handle that information with analytics in the cloud; so, its new and different, but also just an extension of what we already had. It really gives us a chance to more fully capitalize on what weve long been doing.

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Emerson and the Integration of Process and Discrete Automation - Automation World