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Bringing The Connected Enterprise to Life

HIGHLIGHTS OF AUTOMATION FAIR 2017Industry Forums • Automation Perspectives • Process Solutions User Group

November 13-14, 2017 George R. Brown Convention Center Houston, USA

A Special Report by the editors of Control

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TABLE OF CONTENTSROCKWELL AUTOMATION LEADING WITH HEART 3

AUTOMATION FAIR SHOWS #HOUSTONSTRONG SUPPORT 4

NEW DATA COMBINATIONS OFFER DEEPER INSIGHTS 6

VETERAN SKILLS VS. INDUSTRY NEEDS 9

THE CONNECTED ENTERPRISE ANIMATES AT PSUG 11

HOW TO STEM A PANDEMIC IN 3 STEPS 13

AN EARLY LOOK AT PLANTPAX 4.5 15

HOW TO SELECT A GREENFIELD DCS 17

WATER/WASTEWATER INDUSTRY FORUM: EL PASO UPGRADES TO PLANTPAX DCS 18

VEGETABLE OIL AUTOMATION SMOOTHED WITH PLANTPAX DCS 20

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION: THE NEXT GENERATION 22

WHEN A WEB OF CONTROLLERS UNRAVELS 24

BATCH PLANT RETAINS TOP-TIER CLIENT 26

CYBERSECURITY SERVICES FOR THE LIFE OF YOUR PLANT 29

SCHLUMBERGER FINDS EFFICIENCY IN DATA 31

PLANTPAX DCS FULFILLS GOALS FOR LBC 33

FOOD & BEVERAGE FORUM: MODERN CONTROLS, MORE FRENCH FRIES 36

GET TO THE CORE OF SAFETY AND PRODUCTIVITY 38

WELLSITE CONTROLS TAKE HEAT, DELIVER SAFETY 40

OIL & GAS FORUM: ARC LIFTS WELL PERFORMANCE 42

OILFIELD SOLUTION STREAMLINES ASSET INTEGRATION 43

MACHINE & EQUIPMENT BUILDERS INDUSTRY FORUM: BUILT FOR SPEED AND AGILITY 45

STEM BOOTH SPARKS FUTURE ENGINEERS 47

POWER & ENERGY MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY FORUM: MODERNIZATION WITHOUT INTERRUPTION 49

RUN ANALYTICS WHERE THEY MAKE MOST SENSE 51

PULP & PAPER INDUSTRY FORUM: DESPERATELY SEEKING NANO-SENSORS 53

TALENT SHORTAGE DRIVES DIVERSITY INITIATIVES 54

CHEMICAL/SPECIALTY CHEMICAL INDUSTRY FORUM: PROJECT PLANNING MEANS PROFIT 56

INSTANT ANALYTICS AID IN PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATION 58

ENGINEERING, PROCUREMENT AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY FORUM: SAVE ON PROJECTS WITH UNIFIED POWER AND AUTOMATION SYSTEM 60

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ROCKWELL AUTOMATION LEADING WITH HEART2017 already a memorable year for CEO Blake MoretMike Bacidore

“It was one of the single most rewarding things I’ve had the opportunity to do in my career.” Rockwell Automation’s Blake Moret shared highlights of his first 18 months as CEO at this week’s Automation Perspectives media event in Houston.

You might think that company stock reaching record high levels would be enough for Blake Moret to call 2017 a most memorable rookie

year as CEO of the Milwaukee-based leader in indus-trial automation.

But in his keynote address to media gathered for the company’s Automation Perspectives event in the lead-up to this week’s 26th annual Automation Fair in Houston, stock valuations and other matters financial took a back seat to a more human side of the business.

Instead, Moret led with Hurricane Harvey, the storm that dumped 50 inches of rain on the area only 10 weeks earlier. Rockwell Automation was among the companies that joined early in the relief efforts. “We deployed our disaster recovery teams here to help get our customers up and running,” said Moret, president and CEO for the past 18 month and soon to be chairman. In nearby Beaumont, Texas, for example, the river overflowed as a result of the natural disaster—submerging the electric motor drives that pumped the community’s drinking wa-ter. Within 24 hours, the Rockwell Automation team de-livered the new drives necessary to restore water service.

And in March of 2017, Rockwell Automation was one of only three companies to receive the Catalyst Award for its Culture of Inclusion journey, Moret continued. “We’re very proud of it.” The Catalyst Award honors in-novative organizational approaches that address the re-cruitment, development and advancement of women and have led to proven, measurable results.

The company’s Culture of Inclusion journey began in 2007 with senior leaders renewing their commitment to

diversity, inclusion and engagement in response to em-ployee data that showed women and people of color at the company had lower retention rates than white men, and there were gaps in levels of representation for key de-mographics. A key feature of the diversification strategy put in place is an understanding that in order to effect sustainable change, the dominant group—in this case, white men—must be aware of the impact of their privi-lege, be engaged and partner with women and under-represented groups in a meaningful way.

“Even though we’re an automation company, people remain our most important asset,” explained Moret.

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Surely an honor such as that for a benchmark program is cause to rest on your laurels. But Rockwell Automation had yet another ace up its sleeve.

An existential threat“Workforce development is the existential threat to the future of manufacturing,” continued Moret, citing growing shortages of qualified talent in many corners of the industrial market. Rockwell Automation reached across the Milwaukee skyline to partner with Manpow-erGroup, a leader in workforce solutions, to create the Academy of Advanced Manufacturing, a program de-signed to “upskill” U.S. military veterans.

The program builds on the experience of Rockwell Automation in automation training. “We know the cur-riculum and skills that are necessary,” said Moret. “Be-tween 2003 and 2019, it’s estimated that 4.3 million vet-erans will leave the service, and 65% of them will need help finding employment outside the military. As we were working with the Department of Defense, we real-ized so many of the core work skills are already embod-ied in those veterans. Many of those skills could trans-late to the manufacturing environment.”

The program’s goal is to graduate 1,000 veterans per

year by 2019. Over the past couple of decades, Rockwell Automation has graduated more than 7,000 engineers from its internal engineering-in-training program.

“We thought we could take this show on the road and offer it to returning veterans,” said Moret. “Every veteran that goes through the Academy of Advanced Manufac-turing is guaranteed a job. I was at the graduation cer-emony of the first class of 14 last week in Cleveland. It was one of the single most rewarding things I’ve had the opportunity to do in my career.”

Meanwhile, in the industrial automation marketplace, the Rockwell Automation vision of The Connected En-terprise continues to gain traction within the company’s customer base. “The Internet of Things is unlocking new ways of gaining value and increasing productivity, and we are just getting started,” said Moret. “The Indus-trial Internet of Things connects data. We take the data from those plant-floor devices and turn it into useful in-formation and produce positive outcomes for our cus-tomers. We develop advancements to keep people safe in the workplace. People find new and better ways to make things, live and work. Good things happen when we combine the potential of automation with the imagi-nation of people.”

AUTOMATION FAIR SHOWS #HOUSTONSTRONG SUPPORTRockwell Automation rallies volunteers in support of Hurricane Harvey relief effortsDave Perkon

Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in late August, bringing with it a 500-year flood. For Rockwell Automation, the company’s first concern wasn’t

whether its Automation Fair event would go off as sched-

uled 10 weeks later; it was concerned first with the safety of the community. It wanted to make sure that everyone was doing well, and began organizing efforts to give back.

“When a natural disaster hits, Rockwell Automation’s

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Automation Fair attendees pitch in to pack 8,000 Thanksgiving meal kits for Houston area residents affected by recent flooding.

partner of choice and who we go to on a global level is the Red Cross,” said Patricia Contreras, director of global community relations and contributions, Rock-well Automation. “Immediately after Harvey hit, the company made a $75,000 contribution to the Red Cross. At the time, not only had Harvey just hit, but Irma and Maria were turning in the Atlantic. We knew that our partners at the Red Cross had their hands full.”

Rockwell Automation also had an established history with the United Way to support local communities. “We reached out the United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County due to a long standing partnership,” Contreras said, “and it connected us to the United Way of Greater Houston.”

The company moved to create an opportunity for in-dividuals to show their support for those affected by the flooding during the course of this week’s Automation

Fair event at the George R. Brown Convention Center, which had sheltered flood refugees in the weeks after Harvey. “Rockwell Automation wanted for its employees and attendees of the Automation Fair to have a give-back opportunity on the show floor,” said Contreras.

8,000 Thanksgiving mealsInitially, the company considered distributing prepared-ness kits with batteries, a flashlight and other items needed in case of an emergency. But with Automation Fair occurring the week before Thanksgiving, the con-cept of the Thanksgiving meal kit came to be.

“We knew through our partners at the United Way that the number one thing that Houston families are fac-ing, in addition to damage to homes, is the loss of in-come,” said Contreras. “A worker at a small business that closed, a damaged car or difficulty getting to work can all cause hardships.” So Rockwell Automation decided to provide 8,000 Thanksgiving dinner kits to Houston residents “in hopes of making their holiday a little easier and brighter.”

Rockwell Automation, through the United Way,

bought the food from a local grocer who delivered 40 tons of non-perishable staples to the convention center’s floor. “It is enough food to feed 35,000 people a proper Thanksgiving dinner complete with vegetables, gravy, cranberries and dessert along with a gift card to pur-chase a turkey or ham—8,000 of them,” said Contreras.

With approximately 10,500 Rockwell Automation employees, partners and customers onsite for the Au-tomation Fair event, a steady stream of volunteers blew through the task of packing meal kits at the rate of more than 1,300 boxes an hour. The goal was to be done pack-ing the kits over the course of the two-day event, but it only took six hours. The Thanksgiving dinner kits are now being distributed to residents through various United Way affiliate agencies and partners.

“Rockwell Automation has been a long-standing part-ner with United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Wauke-sha County, sponsoring Season of Caring, consistently engaging the most employees and contributing the most collective volunteer hours of any local business organi-zation,” said Jayne Thoma, vice president of volunteer engagement for the United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County. “We are so proud to show the strength of the United Way network coming together to support every community, locally and across state lines.”

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NEW DATA COMBINATIONS OFFER DEEPER INSIGHTSFrank Kulaszewicz of Rockwell Automation cites data orchestra-tion, mixed reality as key digital transformation investments in Automation Perspectives keynoteTom Wilk

At the Automation Perspectives media event this week in Houston, Frank Kulaszewicz, senior vice president, Architecture & Software Di-

vision, Rockwell Automation, charted the progress the company is making to improve digital design and opera-tions while placing greater analytics power in the hands of end users.

“Connectivity and access to information in new and existing assets is really important if we’re going to achieve that vision of smart manufacturing,” Kulasze-wicz said during the media event, a day before the com-pany’s annual Automation Fair. “What we’re trying to do is create a real-time production environment that’s op-timized and sustainable,” one that improves ease of use for customers across industry, and is resilient in the face of changing conditions.

Digital business outcomes“Today, everything we have is becoming connected,” said Kulaszewicz, from phones and watches to cars to homes, each of which can provide information about it-self and when it needs service. “The same thing is hap-pening in industry. It’s the same technologies—mobility, wireless, cloud—and they’re all making their way into production. Devices on the plant floor are becoming smarter and better connected.”

The challenge is to draw data out of isolation in these

assets and devices, and into a platform that enables plant teams to derive new and actionable operational insights.

“Much of manufacturing today is still legacy systems, and many of those legacy systems aren’t connected,” Ku-laszewicz observed. “Because of those systems, industry experiences about $20 billion of downtime every year, so there is a significant opportunity there to gain better vis-ibility into plant operations.”

Adding to the challenge is that industry has not made

“We’re on a mission to combine our understanding of market needs, our technology and our domain expertise to make a powerful industrial analytics platform. Powerful, but easy to use.” Rockwell Automation’s Frank Kulaszewicz discussed extensions and enhancements to the company’s scalable analytics offering.

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uniform progress along its digital manufacturing jour-ney. However, as more digital pilots are run, giving in-dustry a gradual, better understanding of what digital means, Kulaszewicz sees value being generated in long-term revenue and profitability; new connected systems and business models, including new service models for OEMs; and sustainable productivity.

“All of those understandings are driving customers to move ahead with programs to achieve their digital busi-ness outcomes,” Kulaszewicz said. “And for us, it’s driv-ing an understanding of where we should make our in-vestments in the digital space.”

The promise of mixed realityThe first of these digital investments is to develop real-

time, open, analytics platforms that scale across plant network architectures and which encompass the entire production lifecycle from design to operations.

“Digital transformation enables a digital thread,” or trail of information to be collected throughout the en-tire enterprise, one that captures information through-out the lifecycle of a product, asset, system or process, said Kulaszewicz. “It allows seamless collection and analysis of data, and the ability to gain information from that data.”

Ultimately, digital threads combine to enable devel-opment of “digital twins” for physical products, assets and processes—emulations that allow products to be tested before they are built, allow production changes to be tested before they’re happening, and allows de-sign and performance to be optimized during the pro-duction process.

These digital twins increasingly span both design and operations, said Kulaszewicz. In the area of digital de-sign, collaborative design environments are really im-portant to help teams bring better products to market faster, he said. “The environments simplify automation and information design efforts to integrate disparate tools and workflows, and allow complete systems to be simulated.”

To this end, Kulaszewicz announced that the Studio 5000 environment from Rockwell Automation offers three new capabilities:

• Interface to other tools like EPLAN and other CAD systems

• Improved connectivity for emulation environ-ment so users can do operator training with other systems

• OPC-UA open unified connectivity for all Rock-well Automation software products

In the area of digital operations, Kulaszewicz stated, “This phase of the life cycle typically lasts a decade or more, which represents a huge opportunity to impact profitability” across three areas:

• Information management—connectivity, data collection and data orchestration

• Operations—traditional functions like work or-ders, production goals and quality assurance

• Asset reliability—keeping production running in the form of maintenance, troubleshooting, and technical support

One result of the ongoing digitalization of manufac-turing is the ability to generate “mixed reality” environ-ments, where project teams can interact virtually with their designs during the design process. “You can vali-date the design concepts long before they go to produc-tion,” said Kulaszewicz. “Our machine builder libraries help OEMs move away from traditional methods of pro-gramming to modern ways of creating automation sys-tems. The designer shifts from writing code to proven li-braries of machine functions that help them design their systems—more drag-and-drop than it is programming.”

In the process of working with customers on digital pi-lot programs, Kulaszewicz said Rockwell Automation is learning which outcomes have the greatest impacts, and is helping to define the “killer apps” that will have the best return on digital investment. These outcomes can be defined in three value streams:

• Asset management and reliability (i.e., predictive maintenance and prescriptive maintenance)

• Operational productivity (i.e., OEE and produc-tion throughout)

• Risk management (i.e., safety systems, security, track & trace)

Each of these three value streams represents learnings with customers across industry, via digital programs that

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deliver the right information at the right time to enable actions that improve enterprise performance.

The power of data orchestrationThe second area of digital investment Kulaszewicz cov-ered was a deeper ability to orchestrate disparate data sets to drive stronger operational insights in real time. These data sets range from asset-specific condition mon-itoring and asset health data to external supply chain and weather/environmental data.

“We’re on a mission to combine our understanding of market needs, our technology and our domain expertise, to make a powerful industrial analytics platform,” said Kulaszewicz. “Powerful, but easy to use.”

The investment is in a real-time, open, scalable an-alytics platform that allows plant teams to scale across the entire information architecture—the device, the ma-chine, the production line, the plant and the cloud. This allows decisions to be made closest to the source of the data, where they can have the biggest impact on results.

Leading this investment are a new set of capabilities for the Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Analytics Platform that focus on new possibilities in data orchestration.

Existing between the twin poles of data ingress (i.e., collection) and data staging (i.e., dashboards and re-porting), data orchestration can be defined as the space where end users compare, contrast, re-contextualize and otherwise mash-up disparate data sets, based on plant-specific and project-specific needs.

Rockwell Automation has been exploring these tech-nologies under the collective heading of Project Scio, an initiative dedicated to helping plant teams merge new and existing data to achieve useful, actionable infor-mation. At Automation Perspectives, Kulaszewicz was joined by Andrew Ellis, manager of commercial engi-neering, Rockwell Automation, to review progress made by Project Scio and to run a project demo.

Ellis emphasized that Project Scio is designed to help organizations move from more descriptive- and diagnos-tics-based analytics into the realm of predictive and pre-scriptive analytics. Ellis cited data orchestration as the

most common barrier for organizations that are trying to move to more advanced analytics tools.

“Advanced analytics is the world of machine learn-ing and artificial intelligence, and is providing game-changing production benefits for manufacturers,” said Ellis, adding that the challenge for manufacturers in this area is not a lack of data. “The challenge to achiev-ing advanced analytics is being able to process that data, cleanse it, enhance it, then move it into a tool that can be used to provide insights to customers.”

Ultimately, the goal is for platforms like Project Scio to “leverage model-based algorithms to predict future events, and have those events fed back into the control systems in real time,” said Ellis, to prevent downtime and sidestep quality issues.

By delivering these capabilities, added Kulaszewicz, Project Scio also is helping to reduce the process of cleaning data, which in many cases consumes 60% of a data scientist’s time.

The demo showcased the ability of Project Scio to in-gest disparate data sets into an elastic search database, then develop data staging areas based on different mash-ups at the data orchestration layer. One example was the combination of operations data from a fictitious billet manufacturer with lab data on billet chemistry, to more precisely control billet quality throughout the day, across changing environmental conditions like temperature and humidity.

Kulaszewicz and Ellis also demonstrated how Proj-ect Scio develops an initial dashboard of KPIs that the platform thinks will be useful to the operator, based on prior use. “Most folks in industry are not data scientists,” said Kulaszewicz, “and that audience will be crucial for adoption of these products” where the visualization en-vironments become intelligent.

Plant teams also are free to engage in “active dash-boarding” with the Project Scio platform, exploring dif-ferent custom data visualizations. To enable this, Proj-ect Scio features intelligent search, an elastic capability where users can use semantic terms (in English) to ex-plore new analytics and insights.

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VETERAN SKILLS VS. INDUSTRY NEEDSRockwell Automation and ManPowerGroup partner to train re-turning veterans for advanced manufacturing opportunitiesJim Montague

In all the hubbub about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud computing and other forms of digi-talization, a simple fact is often forgotten—a lot of peo-ple will be needed to develop, apply, maintain and opti-mize all these new tools and systems.

Unfortunately, even as these technologies leap ahead, the skills and technical professionals needed to imple-ment them have grown increasingly scarce due to Baby Boomer retirements, layoffs, neglected worker training, and other factors.

“The manufacturing skills shortage is real and wide-spread,” said Chris Layden, vice president, Manpower-Group, in a presentation at Automation Perspectives, a media event hosted by Rockwell Automation in the run-up to the company’s Automation Fair this week in Hous-ton. “Manufacturers and industrial operators worldwide are losing experienced em-ployees to retirement and struggling to find replace-ments. At the same time, rapid technology advances are creating new opportu-nities, but also the need for new skills that aren’t readily available.”

Skills gap profileBased on the results of Manpower’s recent surveys,

Layden reported that, “About 40% of U.S. companies are having trouble finding talent, despite declining un-employment in major markets. This is affecting every employer, and impacting decisions on where to locate plants, and how to handle supply chains.”

To put the technical workforce shortage in its proper context, Layden added that:

• 2 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled in the U.S. by 2025

• Training costs increase as employers seek to close not just the present skills gap, but a new gap that emerges as required skills evolve

• 75% of employers add that new skills will be re-quired during the next two years, but many aren’t able to define them yet

“After 30 years of declines in the number of manu-

Newly minted Academy of Advanced Manufacturing (AAM) graduates (l. to r.) Leandre “Dre” Davis, Travis Tolbert and Scott Bingham described their experiences in Rockwell Automation’s 12-week AAM program.

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facturing jobs but steadily increasing output, we saw a plateau in employment and productivity in the last four years,” said Layden.

“Manufacturing is upskilling. In fact, for the first time, we recently saw that more than half of manufac-turing workers had at least some college; about 75% of employers are doing internal training; and we worked with Digital Manufacturing Design Innovation Insti-tute (DMDII) to identify 165 different roles, such as dig-ital twin architect and data management analyst, which are critical to the success of digital manufacturing.”

Layden added that the emerging Human Age 2.0 and its impact on workforce issues includes four main facets:

• Technological revolution and the impact of dig-italization on people and their skills, which in-cludes emerging markets leapfrogging ahead of those with decades more experience but older in-frastructures

• Rise of client sophistication with power shifting to organizations like Uber, Twitter and Instagram that allow instant performance ratings and noti-fications

• Greater individual choice that consists of people moving from having one job for life to taking on the perspective of a “career for me” if they have the required talents

• Shifting demographics that are altering how peo-ple think about where and how they want to work

Academy gears upRockwell Automation balanced some of Layden’s so-bering news by announcing the first 14 graduates of the company’s newly established Academy of Advanced Manufacturing (AAM). This first class of U.S. military veterans underwent an intense, 12-week training course at the company’s site in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. The veterans were trained as instrument, controls and auto-mation technicians on a range of Rockwell Automation products including controllers, I/O, human-machine in-terfaces (HMIs), power and motion equipment, and net-work and communication devices.

Because more than 4.3 million veterans are expected to leave U.S. military service from 2003-2019, and about 65%

will need help finding outside employment, Rockwell Au-tomaton determined this labor pool could be a rich, ini-tial resource of potential engineers and technicians into which it can instill advanced manufacturing know-how and skills—and begin to close the technical skills gap.

In past years, Rockwell Automation graduated more than 7,000 field service and development engineers and leadership candidates from its three-month basic and three-month advanced training courses. It further dis-tilled this curriculum over the past year to create AAM’s 12-week program.

Joseph Allie, business manager for global compe-tency, Rockwell Automation, reported that the 14 mem-bers of AAM’s first class graduated last week in a cer-emony at the company’s facility in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, and they plan to scale up the program there and at their Milwaukee headquarters. The company ex-pects this first class will set the stage for hundreds and eventually thousands more. Its goal is to have 1,000 graduates per year.

Four of AAM’s first class described their experiences during the Automation Perspectives event. They in-cluded: Christopher Allison, eight-year U.S. Army vet-eran and senior team leader; LeAndre “Dre” Davis, six-year U.S. Air Force veteran, senior airman and HVAC/electrical journeyman; Travis Tolbert, 14-year U.S. Navy veteran and chief electronics technician; and Scott Bing-ham, 10-year U.S. Air Force veteran and offensive avion-ics systems technician.

“The typical day at AAM included hands-on lab work and presentations that were fast-moving,” said Bingham. “The theory and instruction was supported by the day-to-day operations we’ll likely experience in the field on potential jobs. We learned what will happen, and how to deal with it. Our instructors were really experts, and our quizzes, tests and evaluations were supported by practi-cal labs on production facilities, where we learned to use controllers, HMIs, drives and motion equipment. I think it was the closest we could get to real-world experience.”

Davis reported, “We had to use many mechanical skills in the military, and so it felt like that helped us pick up the skills we needed for the AAM course pretty quickly. I think learning about HMIs and visualization

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was most interesting for me because I feel like I’m pretty creative, so I enjoyed learning to build HMI displays box by box, and assigning instructions to them.”

Tolbert added that he appreciated the relevance of AAM’s instructors and training materials, and having the chance to learn to program, connect and configure a wide variety of Rockwell Automation products. “We even got to learn about the latest and greatest control-lers,” he added. “I was a trainer in the military, dealing with many kinds of students, and so I especially appreci-ated how AAM’s instructors responded and adapted so quickly to all our needs, spent extra time with us, and made sure they taught us what we needed to know.”

Following last week’s graduation, Tolbert reported

that he’s already been hired as a process optimization specialist with a paper manufacturing company, while Bingham added that he’s accepted a position with an en-ergy equipment supplier, where he’ll help upgrade plant systems. Davis added that he’s in a second round of in-terviews with another paper manufacturer, while Allison is presently interviewing for a controls engineering job with a Texas-based paper mill. All AAM graduates are guaranteed a job upon graduation.

“I’d challenge our veteran brothers and sisters to change their lives by taking courses like we did at AAM,” said Bingham. “If we can do it, they can do it, too.”

Allison added, “I believe this was the best decision I’ve ever made after choosing to serve my country.”

THE CONNECTED ENTERPRISE ANIMATES AT PSUGScalable analytics—from the edge to the cloud—further advance the Rockwell Automation digital transformation visionJim Montague

All the connections in the world aren’t worth anything if you don’t light them up. But, oh man, when you do turn them on, everything

becomes possible. This includes achieving huge gains in efficiency, productivity and profitability from digitaliza-tion and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as inter-preted by Rockwell Automation and the growing portfo-lio of solutions that enable The Connected Enterprise.

“Why are digitalization initiatives like The Con-nected Enterprise so important? It’s because they help make users more competitive and profitable,” said John Genovesi, vice president and general manager, Informa-tion Solutions Business, Rockwell Automation. “About $4 trillion in value will be driven by manufacturing IIoT by 2025, and 40% in operating income improvement

will come from digital transformations.”This was the primary theme of the two keynote ad-

dresses that this morning kicked off the two-day 2017 Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) in Houston, lead-ing up to the company’s Automation Fair event later this week. More than 860 visitors from 29 nations and 22 in-dustry segments are attending PSUG, which is offering 27 technical sessions, 24 customer applications and five ask-the-expert sessions.

“The Connected Enterprise and the modern distrib-uted control system (DCS) are all about how Rockwell Automation is helping its customers realize value from digitalization,” said Jim Winter, director, Global Process Business, Rockwell Automation. “The Connected En-terprise is enhanced by the IIoT to deliver transformative

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“Why are digitalization initiatives like The Connected Enterprise so important? It’s because they help make users more competitive and profitable.” John Genovesi of Rockwell Automation explained how the company is helping its customers capture their share of this $4 trillion opportunity.

value through productivity and global competitiveness. For users, this means faster time to market, reduced total cost of ownership, better asset utilization and improved enterprise risk management.”

Overcome old control hurdles Where DCSs typically provide data up to scalable an-alytics systems, Winter added that IIoT can also close the loop on what users can learn from those analytics to adjust and optimize their controls—if they can remove some traditional obstacles.

“The problems has been that most DCSs are built on legacy systems that are monolithic, difficult to change, use proprietary software, and rely on scarce expertise,” explained Winter. “The solution is a modern, intelli-gent DCS like PlantPAx that’s open, scalable, plantwide and can integrate both horizontally and vertically. It’s also functionally lightweight, can employ thin clients, and is secured by following IEC/ISA 62443 cybersecu-rity guidelines, which allows easy implementation of de-fense-in-depth strategies.”

Winter reported that several end users are employing PlantPAx and its supporting solutions. These include:

• ARC Resources is using the Rockwell Automa-tion ConnectedProduction well manager solu-tion to decide when and for how long to use ar-tificial lift energy and resources at its well pads, which helps maintain efficient production from these aging and otherwise depleted wells.

• Quimikao’s plant in Mexico makes three types of nitriles, and it’s using redundant, virtualized PlantPAx systems across all aspects of production. So far, it has increased production by 3,300 tons compared to its model plant in Japan.

• Schweppes Australia reports that its syrup line, migrated from a legacy DCS, has employed the PlantPAx DCS to successfully combine its con-

tinuous, discrete and batch controls into one, uni-fied control system.

Extend the leadTo pull further ahead in the modern DCS quest, Win-ter added that Rockwell Automation will launch Plant-PAx, Version 4.5, in mid-2018, and that it will include more than 50 extended capabilities and performance en-hancements for users, including pre-built network archi-tectures, secure cloud access, ACP thin client integra-tion and added IEC/ISA 62443 and role-based security functions.

“The Connected Enterprise embraces most of the ef-forts that Rockwell Automation undertakes as a com-pany, as well as our entire portfolio of connected prod-ucts with our FactoryTalk analytics software on top,” explained Genovesi. “These are combined with Rock-well Automation expertise in five primary industrial ar-eas, so we can help our customers secure their piece of that $4 trillion opportunity.”

Genovesi added that FactoryTalk’s common architec-ture and software layer are likewise being enhanced, so users can go beyond controlling their assets to collect-ing far more data than they have in the past. Smart as-sets such as sensors and actuators, intelligent motor con-

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trols, controllers, mobile devices and displays, analytics and equipment and remote assets report to FactoryTalk’s scalable execution systems, scalable analytics, mobility and collaboration tools, and connected services.

“For instance, under mobility and collaboration, us-ers won’t just see how their applications are perform-ing, but they’ll be able to collaborate using social media tools, and build teams for better performance,” added Genovesi. “In the past, analytics value came from what happened and why. Today, advanced analytics means predictive and prescriptive analytics, so they can take ac-tions to avoid negative anomalies in the first place.”

Further, the Rockwell Automation scalable analytics

philosophy places analytics as near as possible to the rele-vant industrial processes, with aggregated information an-alyzed in the cloud as needed, Genovesi said. “We’re now announcing our FactoryTalk Analytics Project Scio, our new big data initiative and advanced analytics platform.”

The FactoryTalk Analytics Platform brings in data from edge devices, mashes data into similar formats, and applies advanced analytics algorithms. “We start by asking users what their production problem are, and then we engage and help them build a roadmap,” added Genovesi. “Our approach to the IIoT is just an-other way of capturing real-time data without inter-rupting operations.”

HOW TO STEM A PANDEMIC IN 3 STEPSiBio turns plants into bioreactors to develop vaccine proteins through production, infiltration and purificationMike Bacidore

How do you fit 2.2 million plants into one plant? At the iBio plant in College Station, Texas, liv-ing plants are used as bioreactors to produce

vaccine-grade protein.“We grow 330,000 kg of plants in one year,” said Barry

Holtz, president of iBio, who spoke at the Rockwell Au-tomation Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) 2017 this week in Houston. The biopharmaceutical com-pany’s facility is more than 100,000 sq ft, stands more than five stories high and sits on a 21-acre site. “We have unidirectional flow in the building,” explained Holtz. “Everything is automated that can be automated—we don’t allow people to touch our plants.”

The iBio Vertical Pharming manufacturing process, which is automated largely by Rockwell Automation control systems, involves three steps—plant produc-

tion, plant infiltration and downstream purification in autonomous cleanrooms.

The protein-making capabilities of vacuum-infil-trated Nicotiana benthamiana, relative of an Austra-lian tobacco plant grown in a hydroponic system, are hijacked, so the plant’s leaves become bioreactors.

“We seed 1,200 plants per tray, and then we go into germination,” Holtz said. The 55-ft-high laminar air-flow room where germination takes place was designed using computational flow dynamics, and temperature-controlled within 2 °F. The second, larger growth room stands 14 layers high with a capacity of 1.2 mil-lion plants. When the plants reach 8-10 g, they are the perfect size to be bioreactors.

“Agroinfiltration is where the magic happens,” said Holtz. “It’s where we infect the plant with the vector

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“Agroinfiltration is where the magic happens.” Barry Holtz explained how iBio turns tobacco plants into bioreactors at Process Solutions User Group.

for a transient expression of new protein.” The plants are placed upside down in an infecting liquid, evacu-ated to 1/3 of atmosphere, and brought back to atmo-spheric. “All of their protein-synthesizing DNA is hi-jacked,” he said.

Once the plants are fully grown, their proteins are extracted in clean rooms using processes familiar to any biopharmaceutical operation. Seven autonomous clean rooms, or portable pods, are fitted with air bear-ings so they can be lifted an inch off the floor and moved with one hand. “Each clean room has 100% re-dundancy, and it’s all controlled by ControlLogix. We even have our own fire suppression in these rooms,” Holtz said. The process is managed with a PlantPAx distributed control system.

From start to futureThe process was originally developed in a challenge from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “Our first challenge was to design a com-mercial biotherapeutics facility using a plant-made pharmaceutical platform, and design the facility to be hardened, self-sufficient and have high containment,” explained Holtz. “The test was that DARPA sent us a gene sequence by email, then we had to make 50 mil-lion doses in 12 weeks, because that’s what stops a pan-demic in America.”

The support structure for the building is enormous. “We started Quality by Design at the start. We com-puter-optimized all of the drawings,” said Holtz. “The building was built in 3D CAD before we poured any concrete. We use a series of design tools in the Destini Profiler software system. It uses a parametric database, so we can move walls and watch the capex change. To build ours, we raised the first wall on June 8, 2010, and we moved in on March 22, 2011, less than a year later.

“We used some very advanced techniques. And now, we’re currently working in Brazil and South Africa to transfer this technology to other countries.”

In the pharmaceutical industry, the final customer is the patient, explained Holtz. “Screwing up is not allowed,” he said. “We have to be 100% correct each time, which is a daunting task. Quality by Design in-cludes assessment, quality target product profile, risk analysis, process development and validation. I think facility design, information management and automa-tion should be attacked at every step. We are one of the, if not the, most regulated industry on the planet. We’re thinking inside the box. We must have a constantly im-provable environment.

“Improvement should be iterative, not retrospective.” For iBio, that means starting with baseline equipment and software, then improving on it. With the initial lay-ers of automation already in place, the next step will be to add the manufacturing execution system (MES) to the top layer. “We just completed a new front-end en-gineering design (FEED) study,” he explained. “We’ve had as many as 13 people around the table working on this. We’re going to take this FEED study and build to-ward a full MES.”

Holtz said iBio has identified six expectations of an automation supplier:

1. Collaborative development environment, which means exceptional people;

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2. Genuine understanding of iBio technology;3. Multiple levels of service;4. Global service model, with troubleshooting 24/7;5. Long-term dedication to the pharma/biotech in-

dustry; and,

6. New robust products and the maintenance of legacy products.

These expectations are met by Rockwell Automation, Holtz said.

AN EARLY LOOK AT PLANTPAX 4.5Next summer’s release to support smarter, more secure and productive process operationsKeith Larson

Digital transformation in process operations re-quires seamless and secure connectivity be-tween plant-floor devices and the enterprise.

The  PlantPAx distributed control system (DCS)  from Rockwell Automation has long helped make this con-nectivity possible through its alignment with plant-wide automation technology and use of open communication standards.

Process users, partners and OEMs learned more to-day about the new capabilities to be included in Plant-PAx release 4.5—scheduled for release in July 2018—at the opening session of the 2017 Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) meeting. The event runs through Tues-day at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston prior to the start of the company’s Automation Fair event.

“During 2018, new innovations to the PlantPAx DCS will help users create smarter, more secure, robust and productive operations,” said Jim Winter, director, Global Process Business, Rockwell Automation. “The next re-lease of our PlantPAx DCS will again leverage valuable input from process users and align with preferred indus-try standards to deliver increased value to the process industries. These innovations help companies leverage their DCS to more easily capture benefits from plant-wide integration in The Connected Enterprise.”

Jason Wright, PlantPAx business manager, and Kris Dornan, PlantPAx business development manager, to-gether walked PSUG attendees through key features of the new release organized around the themes of smart, productive and protected.

Smart, in the sense that many new capabilities are intended to enhance configuration and operations effi-ciency. “We giving you more tools to allow you to add more value, more quickly,” said Dornan.

Enhancements in the smarter column include Plant-PAx server consolidation, a virtualization solution that for smaller installations (fewer than 1,000 I/O), allows the four essential servers of a PlantPAx installation to run on a single physical server. Standard control panels were also introduced that come fully outfitted with ev-erything but I/O modules in as little as four weeks. Want them configured with I/O of your choice? They’re only six weeks away.

And new integration tools for switchgear and other in-telligent electrical devices allow users to roll electrical control and monitoring system (ECMS) functionality into the DCS, “reducing the total cost of system own-ership,” Wright said. Other smart capabilities on tap in-cludes simpler management tools for redundant system servers, DTM support of EtherNet/IP field instrumen-tation, and an improvements to the system’s function

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“New innovations to the PlantPAx DCS will help users create smarter, more secure, robust and productive operations.” Rockwell Automation’s Jim Winter on new features and functionality on tap for next summer’s release of PlantPAx 4.5.

block diagram editor that streamline development and improve the overall de-sign experience.

Operations productivityProductivity enhancements bundled with release 4.5 aren’t just for system designers but will help operations and maintenance personnel, too. ControlFlash Plus, for example, will allow easier firmware management for us-ers’ full range of Rockwell Automation devices. “Users can set and share favorites, browse and update firmware with far fewer clicks,” Wright explained. New network management and system health historization tools sub-stantially streamline these activities while simplifying troubleshooting.

For operators, the next release will also feature up-dated human machine interface (HMI) and trending tools to help increase productivity and improve effec-tiveness. This includes an enhanced Library of Process Objects to better align with industry display design stan-dards. For example, operators will be able to view alarms superimposed on process variable trends or against pro-cess events to make it easier to find correlations and trou-bleshoot the root cause of process upsets.

Improved operator mobility, too, is a key aspect of release 4.5. Related enhancements include improved ThinManager integration; updated FactoryTalk Batch View, which includes a device-responsive user interface and facilitates event acknowledgement outside the con-

trol room; and mobile alarming and display capabilities that allow operators to “respond where they are,” Dor-nan said. “It’s all about delivering information where you need to go.”

Protected, the final theme of system enhancements on tap with PlantPAx 4.5, is about helping users secure op-erations, reduce unplanned downtime and improve sys-tem availability. These include built-in support for Par-allel Redundancy Protocol (PRP), an industry standard for redundant Ethernet, enabling more secure control-ler and I/O communications. The release also includes area-based security management, to control mobile op-erator privileges based on physical location.

Finally, Dornan and Wright previewed new predic-tive maintenance services coming early in 2018 that feature the use of cloud-based analytics and Rockwell Automation expertise to help PlantPAx users to fur-ther increase productivity, maximize uptime and op-timize production. While not technically part of the PlantPAx DCS, such services do allow users to focus on their core competencies—whether that be brewing beer or purifying biopharmaceuticals. Or, as Rock-well Automation’s Kris Dornan concluded, to “use our technologies and services for things you don’t want to worry about.”

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HOW TO SELECT A GREENFIELD DCSTotal cost of ownership, platform functionality and local expertise lead biotech facility to choose PlantPAx DCSMike Bacidore

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals is a pioneer of RNA-interference medicines for targeting rare dis-eases, such as hATTR amyloisosis, acute he-

patic porphyrias, hemophilia and hypercholesterolemia. Founded in 2002, Alnylam decided to build a greenfield facility in Norton, Massachusetts, to complement its ex-isting manufacturing plant.

“In the plant we’re building, 70% of the process area is an electrically rated Class I, Div. 2 design,” explained Aaron Conant, associate director of automation engi-neering at Alnylam. “It’s greenfield, so it’s a whole new set of challenges. There was no engineering team. We didn’t have any standards or preconceived notions. We had no previous DCS installations in the company.”

Conant shared his story at the 2017 Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) in Houston, leading up to the Au-tomation Fair event later this week.

The new facility would be 210,000 sq ft with two man-ufacturing trains and space for a third. Because there was no company engineering function prior to the proj-ect, Alnylam relied on Jacobs Engineering and Gilbane Construction for their experience and expertise.

The DCS analysis included total cost of ownership, design/scalability and operational considerations. The team analyzed multiple platforms and narrowed them to two final candidates: Emerson’s DeltaV and the Plant-PAx distributed control system from Rockwell Automa-tion. Both had similar capabilities and functionality, but the PlantPAx DCS had the advantage and ultimately hit the right value/price point with lower installation and scale-up costs.

“When we factored in how much to pay people to do the work, it turned into a 30-40% savings to go with Rockwell Automation and PlantPAx,” explained Conant. “And, if we have to go with a third train, the Rockwell system tends to scale up better.”

Engineering expertiseAnother part of the analysis was the talent pool avail-able. “In the New England area, there are hundreds of Rockwell experts,” said Conant, who noted the Emerson expertise was quite limited in the region.

After Alnylam chose the PlantPAx DCS, Rockwell

“We didn’t have any standards or preconceived notions. We had no previous DCS installations in the company.” Aaron Conant explained how Alnylam selected Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx DCS for a greenfield pharmaceuticals facility.

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Automation produced a network architecture, including a fully virtualized server farm and ACP ThinManager as the HMI solution. For the OEM plan, Alnylam went out to vendors for basic quotes with equipment supplied as “dumb” skids.

Where possible, Alnylam specified the skid vendor to supply Rockwell Automation Remote I/O and no controls. For proprietary smart skids, data collection and monitoring were integrated. Skidded systems were specified with Allen-Bradley controllers and PanelView HMIs. Black (non-sterile) utilities, chillers and boilers were specified with supervisory front-ends using Facto-ryTalk View.

Key requirements for system-integrator selection in-cluded strong project-management tools, PlantPAx DCS expertise, experience with the life-sciences industry and

a strong local presence. More than 20 firms were inter-viewed, and they were narrowed to five bidders. “We brought it back in with system integrators doing all of the design for us,” said Conant. “We selected an Avid Solutions, Evolve Systems partnership to integrate this system. There’s a lot of excellent talent in the area.”

The schedule allowed for early evaluation opportu-nities for design aspects. “As part of our early evalua-tion, we bought an industrial data center (IDC),” said Conant. “It helped to de-risk our project. We did every-thing in a NavisWorks 3D model, so now we’re putting all of that data in the IDC.”

The project kicked off a year ago and is now scheduled to finish mid-2018. “There’s activity in the plant,” ex-plained Conant. “We have a building, piping and elec-trical are going on, and we will start up in June 2018.”

WATER/WASTEWATER INDUSTRY FORUM: EL PASO UPGRADES TO PLANTPAX DCSFacilities shouldn’t wait until their systems are as old as El Paso’s before reaping the benefits of the modern DCSPaul Studebaker

Water and wastewater treatment plants rank among the facilities most likely to benefit from control system modernization, and

one way to maximize that benefit is to improve connectiv-ity. By integrating mobility, equipment data and energy monitoring, a connected plant can optimize manpower, maintenance and efficiency, with the potential for rapid ROI and significant long-term cost reductions.

But to reap that return, you have to get the new system installed quickly, with minimal disruption and little or no downtime. “And by the way,” added Trinidad Cruz, re-

gional account manager, Prime Controls, “A typical plant has a staff of about three people.”

Cruz presented the session, “Prime Controls deploys PlantPAx to improve plant automation and system secu-rity” to attendees of the Water and Wastewater Industry Forum this week at the Automation Fair event in Hous-ton. Prime Controls is the third-largest integrator in the U.S., based near Dallas in Lewisville, Texas.

Before Cruz began, forum moderator Kevin Hurdle, industry manager, water and wastewater, Rockwell Auto-mation, described today’s business drivers for connected

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“I used to say that in DCS vs. PLC, the DCS rules, but about 10 years ago, I saw vast improvements from Rockwell Automation.” Prime Controls’ Trinidad Cruz oversaw the automation modernization of wastewater treatment plants in El Paso, Texas, to Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx modern DCS platform.

water treatment plants:• Implementing smart water solutions would save

the industry $7.1-12.5 billion• More than half of utilities have not assessed the

vulnerability and resilience of key assets with re-spect to cybersecurity

• By 2050, 86% of developed countries (64% of de-veloping) will be urbanized, increasing demand for smarter, more sustainable facilities

• Current annual cost of unscheduled downtime is $20 billion

• Nearly three-fourths of North American plants are more than 20 years old

• $65 billion of the global installed base of automa-tion systems is reaching end of life

For these reasons, the digital plant has become a business imperative, Hurdle said. “New technology is not just the latest and greatest, it helps you out in these other areas.”

Showdown in El PasoEl Paso Water Utilities wastewater treatment plants

were facing lost production due to aging control sys-tems. Prime Controls leveraged a PlantPAx DCS to pro-vide a path forward that created a standardized program, reduced downtime and lowered total cost of ownership through modernization and optimization.

The El Paso facilities to be upgraded were its Haskell R Street Wastewater Treatment Plant, which serves cen-tral El Paso, and its Robert Bustamonte Wastewater Treat-ment Plant, serving the city’s east, southeast and lower valley regions. Haskell R Street was built in 1923 with ca-pacity of 28 MGD, 1,500 I/O and a Siemens 505 PLC. Robert Bustamonte was built in 1991, handles 39 MGD, and had 1,950 I/O on an ABB Symphony system. “Not even eBay had parts for the ABB system,” Cruz said. “Haskell R Street was built on landfill and the conduit

was breaking, but they would not use wireless.“Both plants—4,000 I/O—were refitted in six months,

with no shutdown.”The official list of issues and challenges included hard-

ware failures, difficulty supporting hardware and soft-ware, Microsoft incompatibilities, serial I/O network issues, lack of redundancy, limited or no expansion capa-bilities, difficulty upgrading in a timely and cost-effective manner, and expensive support contracts with response times not meeting needs.

DCS versus PLCEl Paso’s system requirements list included robust hard-

ware; redundant local and supervisory control; open ar-chitecture with Modbus interface to OEM PLCs; version control, change comparison and automatic backups; his-torian server for critical data and reports; standard soft-ware, hardware and programming across the plants; con-sistent control system design standards; improved plant automation and system security; minimized spare parts and software; and standardized training for operations and maintenance personnel.

Its project requirements list was shorter, but no less de-manding: turnkey delivery, fast-track delivery, minimal or no shutdown time, additional automation for optimiza-

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tion of plant processes and 24-hour support via secured cellular remote access or onsite.

Prime Controls filled the bill with systems based on the PlantPAx DCS. “I used to say that in DCS vs PLC, the DCS rules, but about 10 years ago, I saw vast improve-ments from Rockwell Automation,” Cruz said.

The PlantPAx distributed control system is “the mod-ern DCS,” added Cruz, who described in detail why they used it. First, the standard Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley hardware and software provides reliability and customer confidence, and Integrated Architecture Builder makes it easy to size hardware. “With PlantPAx (DCS), I can size the processor based on the I/O, and the Integrated Architecture design tools do it for you,” Cruz said.

Redundant ControlLogix control systems and Fac-toryTalk View SE servers provide reliability, automati-cally backed up by FactoryTalk AssetCentre software for disaster recovery and version control. “If it goes down, can you handle it? Or do you want redundancy?” asked Cruz. With AssetCentre software, you always know where your latest software is. “The server stores all your applications, and you have version control. If it disap-pears, you bring back up the latest version. It also give you an audit trail—the DCS had this in the 1990s. If someone makes a change and shuts down the plant, you

can see what they did.”Prime Controls used an Ethernet Device-Level Ring

(DLR) topology to communicate with chassis-based Re-mote I/O. “With ControlNet, you have to schedule to add I/O. You have to go into program mode and shut it down,” Cruz said. “Using Ethernet DLR, you can bring on Re-mote I/O without interrupting the process. The commu-nication from the I/O to the processor is the most impor-tant in the plant.”

The project used Kepware Modbus OPC Server to communicate to other PLCs, FactoryTalk Historian soft-ware for data collection and storage, and FactoryTalk Van-tagePoint for hourly, daily and monthly reports.

Prime Controls took another page from DCS prac-tice, shortened commissioning and prevented potential equipment damage by using simulation to prove the sys-tem. “How do I test 1,900 I/O? You can’t test it on your equipment, you’ll damage it. So use simulation,” Cruz said. Simulation was done on a test system using Stu-dio 5000 Logix Emulate virtual design for virtual PLCs, FactoryTalk SE server, simulation software, and a do-main controller.

“We do simulation on 100% of our projects. The DCS world has done that since the 1990s, and the PLC world needs to catch up,” Cruz said. “Before we download it into the plant, we know it works.

Not surprisingly, refining vegetable oils is similar in many ways to processing crude oil and gas. The plants also share many of the same goals

and challenges—along with the same satisfaction when

a clean, high-quality product is produced.To reach this objective, however, there can many ob-

stacles to overcome, including simplifying historically cumbersome and costly process automaton controls and

VEGETABLE OIL AUTOMATION SMOOTHED WITH PLANTPAX DCSDesmet Ballestra implemented PlantPAx to simplify and stream-line libraries of HMI and process objectsJim Montague

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software, according to Camilo Guevara, automation manager for North America, Desmet Ballestra, a Bel-gium-based designer and builder of equipment and facil-ities for producers of vegetable oils, fats and oleochemi-cals located worldwide.

Seek better screensMost of the equipment and components are supported by human-machine interfaces (HMI) and process ob-jects, “but it can be a challenge to develop and main-tain them because we have screens from Wonderware, RSView 32, Siemens Portal, FactoryTalk View and oth-ers, and we’ve had to build another library of objects and faceplates each time a new software comes along,” ex-plained Guevara. “We build screens for PID control, auto-tuning, transmitters, alarms and trends, and mod-ify them as needed. We’ve also basically used the same FactoryTalk library for nine years, but each customer wants the HMI for their vegetable oil deodorizer to look a certain way based on their individual application, and we need to satisfy those requests in-house.”

Guevara presented “From Development to Start Up in a Vegetable Oil Refinery” at the Rockwell Automa-tion Process Solutions Users Group (PSUG) 2017 meet-ing this week in Houston.

“Desmet Ballestra covers each step of the industry, from oilseed preparation and extraction to oil process-ing plants, including refining and fat modification pro-cesses,” said Guevara. “It’s mastered processing of 40 raw materials, of which soybeans, palm oil, sunflower seed, rapeseed, groundnuts and cottonseed are probably the most popular. Covering more than 8,000 process sections, the group has supplied small and large plants to some 1,700 oil millers in 150 countries.”

One of the primary systems Desmet Ballestra builds are deodorizers, which are basically large distillation columns that can be 90 feet high and 7-13 feet wide. “Deodorizers let users control the percentage of trans

fats in their oils, and bleach and further refine them,” explained Guevara. “What our customers are seeking is a bright, clear and odorless vegetable oil, which can pres-ent challenges for plants that typically produce 50-1,000 tons per day or more of vegetable oil.”

To construct and implement plants for its clients, Guevara added that Desmet Ballestra manufactures and assembles valves, instruments, motor control centers (MCC), control panels, HMIs and computers, including panels and devices for use in classified and hazardous locations that need intrinsically safe (IS) barriers. These are needed because soybean applications typically use hexane in their separation process.

Simpler with PlantPAx DCS“We wanted to focus more on our vegetable oil equip-ment, and leave coding of software objects and following standards to the experts,” added Guevara. However, after adopting an initially promising DCS software package, Guevara discovered that it wouldn’t work with earlier versions; that its DCS and PLC/HMI software were in-compatible and couldn’t even be installed on the same computer; and it required tens of thousands of dollars in added upgrades and other costs.

Fortunately, while recently building a plant in Mexico,

“We installed it, the customer was happy, and we’ve standardized on PlantPAx.” Camilo Guevara or Desmet Ballestra discussed the advantages of using a DCS approach to develop logic and operator displays.

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Guevara reported that its customer suggesting check-ing out the PlantPAx DCS, and they were quickly con-vinced of its advantages. “With PlantPAx, the DCS soft-ware and PLC/HMI software are the same. This means we can use the same PC and object library, and even the new library is free,” he said. “The price to upgrade to a newer version was the same if a TechConnect support agreement was in place, and the price of using older soft-ware versions for development wasn’t an adder. PlantPAx can also use several kinds of small and large controllers, though some added memory may be needed.

“In addition, many programmers were already work-ing on the PLC/HMI, so transition was easier. I took courses, and developed a full PlantPAx application from scratch in just one year. We installed it, the customer was happy, and we’ve standardized on PlantPAx.”

Other simplifications and benefits of the PlantPAx DCS include:

• Network communications via one EtherNet/IP protocol, instead of up to three protocols before;

• Free library of process objects from Rockwell Au-tomation instead of using resources to develop an in-house library; and

• Ability to use only periodic tasks in the PlantPAx

system, instead of being restricted to only a few periodic tasks, and having to rely on continuous tasks before.

“We’re also using the process strategies/import tool in PlantPAx for many functions like valves, which is key to reducing our development time,” explains Guevara. “The code is pre-made for you. You just import it and change the tag, which just takes a few seconds. We can create an object such as a motor at least four times faster than before. And, all we need to do to link it is put in one line, so the tag can be read by the PLC. It’s very easy.”

Guevara added that he recently created a “skeleton” for a deodorizer system that consisted of objects for 100 valves and transmitters, and that with the Plant-PAx DCS, all he needed was a way to connect those objects, which he accomplished with software-defined interlocks. “Now, we just click on objects to get face-plates, and faceplates for maintenance,” he added. “We can still do our own programming when needed, but it’s a big help to have software blocks available for dis-playing valves, transmitters and other devices. Also, with PlantPAx, we can add a wireless access point on top of a panel, and get a secure, remote-access display of the ac-tual panel, which speeds up I/O checks.”

Visitors to the Automation Fair exhibit hall this week at Houston’s George R. Brown Conven-tion Center can peer into the not-too-distant

future at the “Innovations” booth. An exclusive look at forward-thinking technologies on the verge of release, the Rockwell Automation exhibit showcases the next generation of industrial automation.

“All other booths show products that are available,” ex-plained John Pritchard, manager, strategic business devel-opment, Rockwell Automation. “This is where we share with customers technologies that are works in progress. We want to share those developments before they’re ma-ture, so customers can see the direction we’re headed. And we want to get feedback about those technologies.”

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION: THE NEXT GENERATIONInnovations booth showcases new Rockwell Automation technol-ogies on the verge of releaseMike Bacidore

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The booth originated three years ago and has seen many of its displays go on to become successful Rock-well Automation solutions. This year’s booth is demon-strating technology that spans the application gamut, from design and analytics to display and mobility. “We’re showing technologies involved in the design process,” said Pritchard. “We’re showing technologies around an-alytics and how they can scale. We’re showing technolo-gies around how information shows up, including mixed reality. And we’re addressing the increased use of mobil-ity in the manufacturing environment.”

New design technology on display involves informa-tion already available in Rockwell Automation’s Stu-dio 5000 Application Code Manager, where machine builder libraries include information such as machine state, events, consumption rates and runtime odome-ters. “Customers have always been able to get to that in-formation. But this is like a catalyst because we’ve elimi-nated all of the manual work to get at that data. It can be used on-premise or shot up to the cloud,” said Pritchard. “This is big news for control design engineers.”

Analytics on paradeAnalytics is also focus of Rockwell Automation’s devel-opment efforts, and examples abound in the Innova-tions booth. “We’re showing a new technology called servo-motor analytics,” said Pritchard. “Our engineers have designed and embedded sensing technology into the servo motor itself and then worked with data scien-tists to look at and understand the signatures the sen-sors pick up.”

Based on data gathered from 3D accelerometers, the analytics are able to tell whether the servo motor is ex-periencing an offset load, detect anomalies in timing-belt tension, and alert if the motor is experiencing bear-ing wear.

“The timing-belt tension is a real chestnut,” said Pritchard. “It’s especially useful to know during setup

that you’ve set the tension correctly,” “We showed predictive analytics for the first time last

year,” explained Pritchard. “The predictive analytics run locally to a controller and are able to monitor con-trol variables. You teach it what good looks like and what bad looks like.” With a bit of experience and fuzzy logic, the analytics are able to identify bad before it occurs. It’s able to spot pump cavitation, for example, before it hap-pens and initiate appropriate corrective action.

Designed to be fully scalable, the analytics can run at the device level—on an option card in a PowerFlex drive, for example—on a local industrial computer or back at an industrial data center (IDC). “Here, it’s run-ning on the CompactLogix 5480,” said Pritchard,” but the core analytics function can be deployed at a system or device level.”

When Automation Control Products (ACP) was ac-quired by Rockwell Automation in September 2016, its ThinManager technology provided a viable means to deliver information to a variety of displays, from laptops to tablets to phones. “Now, we’re working on relevance, meaning displays can be tailored so different informa-tion shows up to different people by location.”

Those displays can even include Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headsets (photo). Because the HoloLens runs Windows 10 IoT—a “skinny” implementation of Windows 10—it can run a range of Windows-based ap-plications, including universal ThinClient Manager (UTCM) interfaces into “heavier” applications hosted elsewhere. In the mixed-reality environment, the wearer

Rockwell Automation’s John Pritchard (left) took author Mike Bacidore on a tour of the Innovations booth at Automation Fair, where the pair test drove a mixed reality interface for a cartoning machine.

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simply needs to look at or above a machine or device to see relevant information floating above it in a virtual machine dashboard.

Finally, the TeamONE application environment for mobile devices is showcasing some new modules in

the Innovation booth. “We’ve got a Festo module and a connected production module, as well as a module for the servo-motor analytics,” said Pritchard. “You can use any of these to send information and alerts to the TeamONE application on your mobile device.”

WHEN A WEB OF CONTROLLERS UNRAVELSPhillips 66 replaces 32 SLC 500s with virtualized PlantPAx platformPaul Studebaker

Phillips 66 operates facilities and pipelines through-out Texas and across Louisiana. A project to up-grade its automation system at the finish process

terminal in Pasadena, Texas, involved the truck rack and pipelines for 21 tanks storing 3.2 million barrels of gaso-line, diesel, biodiesel and ethanol.

The Pasadena facility had undergone several expan-sions over the years, each handled by adding a new con-troller, typically in a new location. It used 32 SLC 500s and one PLC-5 with a Wonderware HMI, connected by a single run of fiber-optic cable. “The perimeter of the facil-ity is over a mile, quite a large area, and data requests had to be sent from controller to controller,” said Asa Ange, CAP, engineering supervisor, Champion Technology Services, Sulphur, Louisiana, to attendees of his session at Rockwell Automation Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) 2017 this week in Houston.

Phillips 66 contracted with Champion Technology Services to update the system. A process system integra-tor for Rockwell Automation, Champion was founded in 2000 in Louisiana as a system integrator in industrial au-tomation and controls. Over the years, it expanded its geo-graphical and services ranges and expanded to Texas in 2008. It now offers a broad range of specialties in automa-tion, power, information and safety systems for industries

from oil & gas and chemical to food & beverage, marine and utilities.

Growth painsAt the Pasadena plant, “the communications system was a complicated spider web, with multi-hop messaging to get data from a controller in one place to where it was needed,” said Ange. “It was hard to manage and hard to trouble-shoot, and frequent trips led to long periods of downtime.” A message from a truck lane might travel to the truck rack, terminal, and back to start a pump, passing through mul-tiple interlocks in other controllers. The interdependence of the controllers meant there was no way to take a control-ler down without taking the whole facility down.

The Wonderware HMI was rendered in many colors with animation, which didn’t conform to current stan-dards, and was inconsistent with other Phillips 66 facili-ties. “It’s very distracting when a truck drives across the screen, but I gather that approach was common at the time the HMI was made,” Ange said. At the same time, the information to the operator was limited. In particular, interlock information was inconsistent and incomplete.

The flat, single-line fiber-optic network meant one point of failure would take out everything downstream. “It would be a site outage,” Ange said. “The network screen

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would show a connection was down, but no information about why.”

Historical data was incomplete. “Some data logging was done within the controllers, which led to memory overloads and down controllers,” Ange said. Equipment status information was transferred from shift to shift using Post-it notes on the console.

Document, develop, implementAlong with a lack of system documentation, the project constraints included requirements to limit downtime to three days, re-use the existing I/O racks and fiber-optic network and loop-check every end device.

“We started by documenting the network. We took pic-tures of the insides of the cabinets and figured out every wire,” Ange said. For every I/O, Champion determined wire color, location, purpose and HMI usage. They went through the logic and added rung comments, tag descrip-tions and routine names. “We made a message map of all the data entering and leaving each controller; on average, each controller sent data to three others. The cause-and-effect diagram took up a 10-ft section of wall,” Ange said.

Champion then developed “control narratives” for each piece of equipment, describing its I/O, their locations, permissives and interlocks. “This was very helpful and im-portant for writing the new code and later transferred well to PlantPAx,” Ange said.

Along with using PlantPAx logic and HMI, Champion proposed to modernize the controllers and top end of the automation system, and convert the existing PLCs to re-mote I/O. The new solution eliminates the SLC 500s and segregates the terminal and truck rack into two separate systems. Flex I/O remote racks were added where needed to receive segregated truck rack I/O. The new network fol-lows the Purdue model, with levels 2 and 3 on VLAN net-works, and levels 0 and 1 on a device-level ring.

A new industrial data center (IDC) based on Rock-

well Automation E2000 has two physical ESXi servers, a network storage array, two network switches and redun-dant power supplies, “an addition made by Champion,” Ange said.

PlantPAx controllers and HMI were chosen because they adhere to HMI and Phillips 66 standards and be-cause they’re tested and proven, come with Rockwell Automation documentation and are easy to use. “The technicians can go to classes and learn it, and take that knowledge to other facilities,” Ange said.

The HMI tones down the colors but retains the high density of the overview screens, using colors only where needed to attract attention to problems and alarms.

Startup and benefits“Checkout and startup went well, and within the three-day limit,” Ange said. Benefits include eliminating all of the problems of the old system.

A detailed interlock list tells what caused a shutdown, with direct navigation to the specific interlock, equipment and I/O location. “Maintenance bypasses are available on the PlantPAx faceplates, so instead of hopping from con-troller to controller, technicians can navigate to an inter-lock and bypass it if needed,” Ange said.

Segmented networks allow technicians to take the

“We made a message map of all the data entering and leaving each controller; on average, each controller sent data to three others. The cause-and-effect diagram took up a 10-ft section of wall.” Champion’s Asa Ange explained Phillips 66’s journey to PlantPAx at the Rockwell Automation Process Solutions User Group.

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truck rack down without affecting the pipelines, and re-dundancy keeps it reliable. “If you have a single loss, it shows you where and turns yellow; a full failure will alarm in red on that rack,” Ange said.

The new historian gives improved trending, tracks transfers and inventories, and allows technicians to look back and troubleshoot, Ange said. The asset management system does management of change, tracks terminal op-erations and movements, logs truck rack operations, and allows operators to log in and create notes for other opera-tors. “No more Post-it notes,” Ange said.

The current architecture allows for easier expansions,

segregates control networks by functional operations, re-solves spurious trips and inconsistent operations, and con-forms to current industry standards. The PlantPAx DCS provides a common framework that allows for configu-ration vs. programming, improved diagnostics, historical data and asset management, and “it’s future-proof due to the virtual environment,” Ange added.

Due to success at Pasadena Terminal, Champion has partnered with Phillips 66 to deploy similar solutions at Lake Charles Pipeline and other terminal facilities, Ange said. “As we speak, my co-presenter is not available be-cause he’s installing a similar system at another facility.”

BATCH PLANT RETAINS TOP-TIER CLIENTDuPont facility saves customer, wins new business and moves into 21st century by automating blending operations with Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Batch, eProcedure and Material ManagerPaul Studebaker

You just put some materials in, mix them up, maybe do some filtration and package it. It might not even seem worth automating, until a

top-tier customer spending $300,000 a month says they want you to. That was the situation at a DuPont facility in California, making electronics cleaning solutions that are so special, they can’t be named.

“It’s a formulation process that looks simple but is sur-prisingly complex, done almost entirely manually,” said Nancy Givens, P.E., automation and process control en-gineering consultant, DuPont. “It had a semi-automatic mode but it was rarely used because the operators didn’t trust it.”

Givens presented the session, “DuPont Migration and Batch Automation Using Rockwell Automation Facto-ryTalk Batch, eProcedure and Material Manager” at the Rockwell Automation Process Solutions User Group

(PSUG) meeting this week in Houston. At DuPont, she provides consulting services to sup-

port process improvement, operator training simulators, process monitoring, and capital projects. Her expertise includes batch automation, systems integration, plant commissioning and startup, wireless instrumentation, and wireless/mobile applications for manufacturing & process control.

The facility was running a Rockwell Automation PLC-5/60 with an Intellution HMI. The hardware and software were obsolete and no longer supported. The legacy system was “way past Silver Series, with pop-up screens galore that didn’t disappear automatically, so there was a lot of clutter with high potential for human error,” Givens said.

Alarm setpoints were a mix of user-editable and hard-coded, which were difficult to maintain. “It was done way before ISA 101 or 82, and there was no way to assign

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“I kept reminding the plant that no individual operation is unique. It’s what you use—the chemical components—and what sequence of steps you put them through that is unique.” DuPont’s Nancy Givens shared lessons learned in the course of a recent batch automation overhaul.

alarm priorities,” Givens said.

Time to move upOne of the reasons the plant replaced the system was the risk of losing the business of that important cus-tomer. Preventing that meant improving quality control through recipe-based automation. Another reason was to increase production on a sold-out product, a $1 million per month potential that could be met with through unit coordination.

The project was planned in phases. Phase 1 was to upgrade the HMI and PLC to a Rockwell Automa-tion PlantPAx DCS, keeping similar functionality but with improvements. Phase 2 added FactoryTalk Batch, eProcedure and Material Manager for full recipe and sequential automation. A later improvement modified FactoryTalk Batch for unit coordination.

But there were challenges. For one, “The plant’s fa-vorite system integrator (SI), TechKnowsion, had no ex-perience with FactoryTalk Batch, so we needed to bring them along,” Givens said.

DuPont has done similar batching upgrades elsewhere and wants to leverage work from other sites, so it wanted to get DuPont Engineering or a business subject matter expert (SME) involved early. Givens was the SME on this project.

They decided to use the system integrator for phase 1 work, and to use Rockwell Automation and the SI in tandem for phase 2. Rockwell Automation provided the FactoryTalk Batch knowledge to train the SI, and the SI built repeat instances and learned the application for long-term support.

Givens was involved in all phases to train the SI on DuPont library for HMI/controller objects in phase 1, and to ensure leveragability in phase 2 from similar batch upgrades.

In detail, the functional requirement specification

(FRS) was done with Rockwell Automation and Tech-Knowsion; detailed design by DuPont, Rockwell Auto-mation and TechKnowsion; configuration 60% Rock-well/40% TechKnowsion; and FAT by DuPont, Rockwell and TechKnowsion. The punch list was resolved by Rock-well Automation with testing by TechKnowsion; and site commissioning and startup involved DuPont, Rockwell Automation and TechKnowsion.

A second challenge came when they realized the SI had sized the controller based on regulatory control, and didn’t take into account the need to load phases, etc. “We’d put in an L71 and needed more, so we went all the way to an L75,” Givens said. “Our rep worked with Rock-well Automation and we were able to make an exchange. The lesson is, you need to have someone knowledgeable about the whole architecture there from the beginning.”

“TechKnowsion had critical knowledge but needed to learn from Rockwell,” Givens said. “In all phases, we involved the SI so they could know the whole process, which is important for long-term support, future expan-sions, and adding automation to the skids.”

Phase by phaseThe phase 1 controller and HMI upgrade involved re-verse engineering of PLC-5-based code to determine the

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requirements for new code. “We didn’t just convert the code,” Givens said. “We didn’t use a conversion module, we improved the code and cleaned it up.”

A PlantPAx-based DuPont library was used for con-trol modules, and a gray-scale HMI includes alarm management capabilities with alarm setpoints and priorities set at the control module faceplate. “We fol-lowed ISA101 recommendations for HMI, and 18.2 for alarm management,” Givens said. “Now the displays are simple, gray-scaled, and use the DuPont library with PlantPAx graphics.”

Phase 2, batch automation, “started, finished and was executed as an S88 design, with strict separation of the physical and procedural model,” said Givens. “I kept re-minding the plant that no individual operation is unique. It’s what you use—the chemical components—and what sequence of steps you put them through that is unique.”

“We thought all the unit operations would be class-based, but for some products that used filters, we needed instance-based,” Givens said. “We thought about trick-ing the system because it would be easier, but that could cause problems at a later date if someone tried to put a program on the wrong machine. It was a philosophy dis-cussion we had to have, and decided to do more work as a project team for the long-term benefit of the plant.”

Modularized code promotes reuse and flexibility, and separate physical and procedural models provide flexi-bility. Automated phases in Phase Manager include ma-terial addition, routing, agitation and packaging. Addi-tion phases are material-based to work with FactoryTalk Material Manager, and manual phases managed by Fac-toryTalk eProcedure, with prompts for sampling, recipe review, etc.

“We found we needed to run a timer over two units to track total time. We could have built controller-based timers and transferred the time from one controller to an-other, but that could get complex. Instead, we were able to configure it as a report parameter with just a few clicks using the inherent capabilities of FactoryTalk Batch.”

FactoryTalk eProcedure is used across DuPont in Facto-ryTalk Batch implementations. It provides a manual phase that smoothly integrates with automated phases, without a need for a controller-based phase. “eProcedure lets you

create a recipe without knowing which steps are manual and which are automated,” Givens said. “That gives you more flexibility.”

Givens uses eProcedure View for operator interface, not FactoryTalk Batch View. “You can create instruction files using HTML, and data can be entered by the operator or using barcode scanner. Entries can be selected via button or dropdown, with display of parameterized information and live data.

This was the first DuPont use of FactoryTalk Material Manager. “Level readings in the storage tanks are not ac-curate, and the plant was not interested in investing in better level technology,” Givens said.

The site maintains a paper log of storage tank inputs/outputs to track inventory. FactoryTalk Material Manager will make this electronic and provide other benefits of au-tomation, including tracking and reporting of materials and lots, automatic tank switching, and material-based addition phases (not equipment-based). It can also be used for manual charges and tanker offloads.

Commissioning, startup and resultsServers were staged in a conference room, factory ac-ceptance test was completed and startup was per-formed on a weekend. Production turned the system over on Saturday at 2 pm, then HMI alarm and his-tory databases were migrated to image, and the images were replicated to the correct primary server. On Sun-day, they installed and started the servers, and checked out all services and connections. Production started at 4 pm Sunday. “We did two-shift coverage for the next week—we were right with them, got their comments and made improvements.”

The new system is fully supported, provides alarm management, and has a calm, gray-scale HMI for less risk of human error. Alarm setpoints and priorities are in the control modules. The controller programming is ladder and function block—well organized and clean. Batches are fully automated, including cleaning, and reported through SQL reporting services.

On reflection, for the dual execution strategy, Givens advises having one subcontractor report to the other for a chain of responsibility. Require vendors to use recom-

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mended software/versions. Review all recipe designs to ensure accuracy of steps and timing. “This is best done by the end user and not the vendor,” Givens said. And re-quire early configuration reviews to discover problems be-fore they are throughout the software. “Sequential func-

tion chart programming is not like ladder logic.” In conclusion, Givens acknowledged contributions

by Robin Lopez at DuPont, Gregory Arevalo and Omar Ponce at TechKnowsion, and Tom Branch and Alex Bol-las at Rockwell Automation.

CYBERSECURITY SERVICES FOR THE LIFE OF YOUR PLANTRockwell Automation bakes cybersecurity into its networking solutions and services Jim Montague

If the first question is, “How can my organization par-ticipate in The Connected Enterprise and profit from its performance gains?” the second question is, “How

can I do it securely and safely?”To answer both queries and give its customers the

confidence to fully participate in today’s more tightly integrated networks, Rockwell Automation is offering a continuum of cybersecurity and other services, and is demonstrating them this week in the Connected Ser-vices exhibit at Automation Fair 2017 in Houston.

“With today’s raised threat levels, we’re all focusing more on cybersecurity. However, these alerts and infor-mation typically come from many different sources, so we’re pulling them together into one view,” said Sher-man Joshua, portfolio manager for Connected Services, Rockwell Automation. “This lets users understand high-level attacks, and deal with them before, during and af-ter they occur.”

Security spectrum To give users the appropriate firewalls and software patches before probes, intrusions and attacks happen, Joshua reported that Rockwell Automation services per-sonnel begin by performing its asset inventory service. “Our people walk a customer’s facility, collect all its as-

sets and profiles, and put them in a hierarchy,” explained Joshua. “After that, we do ongoing evaluations with tools like Claroty software, which does passive monitoring to keep the inventory up to date.”

Cybersecurity at this “before” stage also involves the Rockwell Automation Qualified Patch Management ser-vice that relies on Microsoft Azure, publishes patches to a customer site, and provides a list that the customer and the Rockwell Automation team can use to develop and carry out an appropriate patching plan. These prepara-tion services also include:

• Vulnerability and Risk Assessments,• Industrial Control System (ICS) Security Zone

and Industrial Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) Seg-mentation, and

• Industrial Security Countermeasure Deploy-ment, such as firewalls, application whitelisting for legacy devices, and protection software from Symantec, another Rockwell Automation partner.

Using data from Claroty and its other security prep-arations, Joshua reported that Rockwell Automation’s cybersecurity offering “during” operations uses a base-line for normal operations to determine when abnormal network traffic or other anomalies are happening. “We blend baseline/normal traffic, and use detection tech-

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nology with services management, which lets us look at industrial protocols, and even map how a PLC is talking to drives from multiple vendors,” added Joshua. “Having reports like these and the asset inventory on the cloud in Azure makes them much easier for users to access com-pared to the Excel spreadsheets they used to get.”

Other security measures “during” and immediately “after” intrusion and attack events include:

• Real-Time Threat Detection Services• Remote Monitoring and Response Services• Incident Handling and Response, Incident Re-

sponse and Disaster Recovery Planning Services• Backup and Recovery Solutions, such as Rockwell

Automation FactoryTalk AssetCentre software, which can assist backup and recovery efforts be-cause it can restore entire computers, servers and plant images

“Besides simply monitoring switches and servers, we also evaluate asset health because device performance can also indicate that an abnormal event may be hap-pening,” said Joshua. “If a switch or other component is heating up unexpectedly, it could indicate an attack.”

In addition to monitoring and reporting on networks and hardware for customers, Joshua added they can also use their new FactoryTalk Network Manager software to easily monitor and troubleshoot their networks on their own, with little IT expertise required. “FactoryTalk Network Manager enables a blend of us and our user monitoring their networks,” explained Joshua. “It’s in-formation technology (IT) horsepower at an operations technology (OT) skill set.”

While implementing cybersecurity tools and software is crucial, Joshua cautioned that it must be accompa-nied by a response and recovery plan for when a security breach actually occurs. “You must know what to do. You don’t want to be scrambling,” said Joshua. “So, we con-sult with each customer’s IT and OT leaders, and find

the middle ground on which they can build their Inci-dent Handling and Response Plan, and test it, so they can contain and eradicate infections, but also balance it with the need to maintain production.”

Essential network servicesWhile cybersecurity might seem like a final goal, Joshua reported it’s also part of a series of network services that users need to run their applications efficiently and prof-itably. “The foundation of building industrial networks is taking security into account, but pre-engineered so-lutions can also help users get their networks installed faster, as well as implement best practices for cybersecu-rity. Most users have a hodgepodge of networks, but to achieve The Connected Enterprise, they need a more deliberate way to transfer data from their plant floors to the enterprise.”

The best vehicle for making this journey is Rockwell Automation’s Industrial Data Center (IDC), the five-year-old centerpiece of its Pre-Engineered Network Solutions portfolio. Consisting of rack-mounted servers and virtual networks in an industrial enclosure, the IDC was a col-laborative effort by Rockwell Automation and a who’s who of its partners, including Microsoft, Cisco, Panduit, VM-ware and EMC2. Its latest capabilities include:

“Pre-engineered solutions can help users get their networks installed faster, as well as implement best practices for cybersecurity,” Rockwell Automation’s Sherman Joshua explained the broad range of cybersecurity services and capabilities the company offers today at Automation Fair.

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• Patch management services managed by Rock-well Automation,

• Backup solutions and location separation func-tions, and

• Gateway devices that receive data from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) components and trans-fer them to the cloud.

“When users need set up a secure network quickly, IDC lets them do it comfortably with a tested solution that gets them to market faster,” he said. “We also give them one part number, and most importantly, one num-ber to call for support. Instead of having to call a differ-ent supplier for each component or system, we support the IT side and all the attached OT applications and hardware with Industrial Data Center. Plus, we can do all of these tasks as managed services for a low monthly fee. We call it Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).”

For instance, Joshua reported, the Rockwell Automa-tion Connected Services team recently helped a min-ing client with 21 sites assess its facilities; plan, sep-arate and segment its networks; add pre-engineered devices like building blocks; install new switches, fi-ber and copper cabling; implement PLCs, drives and

HMIs; and roll out four or five sites at a time. “We were able to complete this project for them in one year, even though they expected it would take two years, which was a 50% savings,” said Joshua.

Similarly, he added, Pepsico recently needed to up-grade networking at seven of its beverage plants, but wanted to do it without using its capital expenditure (CapEx) budget, and to enable its OT staff to monitor and manage the new network. As a result, Pepsico ad-opted Rockwell Automation’s IaaS program two years ago, scaled it up a year ago, and is continuing to expand it to 20 plants. Rockwell Automation also layered in se-curity and patch management services with its pre-en-gineered equipment.

“We’re proud of the fact that our average response time to critical alerts and alarms for this application is three minutes,” added Joshua. “In fact, if a response takes more than 10 minutes, the service level agreement (SLA) in our contract contains penalties for us. We really mean what we say about the performance for this application, but with us monitoring and managing its infrastructure, we’ve also achieved a 90% reduction in troubleshooting time, which has meant a lot less downtime.”

In oil and gas exploration and production (E&P), there is quite a history of meeting market challenges with in-novation and technology. Across the E&P sector, there

is a general, broad belief that digital technology is going to play an important role in the future of the industry.

“Most companies in oil and gas today focused on how to not just survive, but how to thrive in the new environ-

ment industry finds itself in,” said Gavin Rennick, presi-dent, software integrated solutions, at Schlumberger, in a session at Automation Perspectives, a media event hosted by Rockwell Automation in the run-up to the company’s Automation Fair this week in Houston. “They are looking at how to create value for themselves and their customers and how to differentiate themselves with their products.

SCHLUMBERGER FINDS EFFICIENCY IN DATAUpstream oil and gas companies seek ways improve competitive-ness and drive business performanceDave Perkon

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“We have reduced the time it takes to plan and engineer a well in half.” Schlumberger’s Gavin Rennick explained how data can improve exploration and production efficiency.

Much of their focus is around efficiency and effectiveness and how they deliver that across their enterprise.”

Globally we are now more connected than ever be-fore, said Rennick. “The statistics say that in 2015 there were 500 million connected devices,” he said. “Today, we believe there are around 8 billion and, within a decade, about a trillion. These devices are producing an enor-mous amount of data, so data becomes central—the qual-ity of data, how the data is managed, the security of data. How to extract real value, real insight from that data is really important.”

Schlumberger’s software integrated solutions group has been thinking about this for a number of years and is fo-cused on how technologies can impact the business re-sults and performance of its customers. It uses a business-led, outcome-focused and technology-driven approach, Rennick said.

Understand technologyThe consumer technology world continues to change very fast, so Schlumberger did its homework reviewing re-ports and studies on the potential of these technologies. There were a huge range of predictions, anywhere for 6% to 30% of total E&P could be affected by this technology. That’s somewhere between $50 billion and $250 billion.

It was clear that a deeper dive was necessary to under-stand the technology, so in 2014 Schlumberger restruc-tured to focus much more on this new wave of digital technology and how to extract the most value from it.

For the past 35 years, Schlumberger has been designing and building software applications for the petrotechnical and engineering communities across oil and gas, with 70,000 active users of this technology. It supports these users with more than 4,500 domain scientists such as ge-ologists, geophysicists and production engineers.

Both the user base and domain experts were engaged to understand which areas had the most potential. There

were hundreds. Many were the basis for proof of concepts that were performed. “The best results we got were when we were able to connect the people who understood the technology with people who understood the science and domain and then focused them on an outcome,” said Rennick. “Working together, it’s amazing what they can do in a quick period of time.”

To make this possible, Schlumberger needed a sim-ple way to connect across its customers’ companies and people to science and technology. It didn’t exist in the industry, so it reached out to its partners in industry and created it.

“In September this year, Schlumberger launched an environment called Delfi—the cognitive E&P environ-ment,” said Rennick. “It has a tremendous level of se-curity, and it’s data-centric. It allows simple, frictionless access and manipulation of data. It allows collaboration across the enterprise between multiple parties enabling them to work together in an entirely different way while capable of being personalized to each individual in the environment. And, residing in the cloud, it was scalable and allowed tasks to be automated for efficiency.”

Accurate simulationThe production of oil and gas is complex, and Schlum-

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berger holds a number of pieces of technology in software that allow it to simulate everything that happens in an oil and gas reservoir. “With these computationally expensive simulators, we are able to create a full digital representa-tion of this process. But the network of systems is chang-ing all the time, making it difficult to keep the simulations accurate. It required a lot of work from production engi-neers and technical specialists to keep things adjusted.”

As Schlumberger started to work in the production space, it kept running into Rockwell Automation. “We are excited with some of the things we are doing with them,” continued Rennick. “Rockwell Automation’s production-automation solutions include self-declaring devices, as well as some capabilities with edge analytics that are su-per interesting.”

These added capabilities allow Schlumberger to en-sure it has an accurate network and real-time data flow-

ing back to the simulation. “Changes are automatically recorded and fed into our simulation, adjusting it in real time, said Rennick. “We can deliver accurate insight into the process. We can see, as a result of device changes, if any problems are going to happen and then, using Delfi, predict and send an action to the field to fix the problem before it occurs.”

A number of proof points validated the understand-ing and use of technology. “We have reduced the time it takes to plan and engineer a well in half,” said Rennick. “We also found that 90% of the tasks petrophysicists and geologists were conducting could be automated, mak-ing them more efficient and able to focus on high-value tasks. We are also seeing a 30% improvement in ser-vice reliability; availability increased 15%; and there are many other real impact examples. The right tools are in place to make that happen.”

Organic growth is a wonderful thing, but when it means that, over decades, you added and grew independent facilities around the world, each

with its own control philosophy, culture, systems and suppliers, well, that can present some problems. Espe-cially if you want and need to implement uniform pro-cess safety standards, rationalize your asset management strategy and spares, lower total cost of ownership and em-brace the synergies offered by the connectivity that sup-ports initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Such has been the case at LBC Tank Terminals, an in-dependent operator of midstream and downstream bulk

liquid storage facilities for chemicals, oils and refined pe-troleum products. It owns and operates a global network of terminals in Europe, Asia and America with a com-bined storage capacity of 1.9 million cubic meters.

LBC also provides logistic connections via rail, road, ships/barges and pipelines. Headquartered midway be-tween Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium, it has more than 550 employees and in excess of 300 customers, “many of which are more familiar to you than we are,” said Xiling “Tess” Zhou, group director, global projects, LBC Tank Terminals Group.

Zhou co-presented “LBC Tank Terminals implements PlantPAx DCS to sustain profitability” with Kris De

PLANTPAX DCS FULFILLS GOALS FOR LBCOrganic growth left multiple tank terminal facilities with poor reli-ability, security concerns and a hodgepodge of black boxes. The cure was a clear vision, executed by a strong partnershipPaul Studebaker

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“Each terminal had its own knowledge but couldn’t share it. We couldn’t have a regional or global spare parts program and couldn’t apply standards for upgrades.” LBC Tank Terminals’ Tess Zhou explained how her company cleared hurdles at the Rockwell Automation Process Solutions User Group meeting this week in Houston.

Roeck, senior business consultant, Agidens, at the Rock-well Automation Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) conference this week in Houston.

Agidens is the second leg of the LBC/Agidens/Rock-well Automation triad that helped LBC move from a polyglot of legacy systems to a coherent, transparent and connected automation and control strategy, including projects to replace the systems at three facilities between 2013 and 2017.

Founded in 1947 in Antwerp, Belgium, Agidens special-izes in automation and control for tank terminals, life sci-ences, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, infrastructure (moving bridges) and chemical industries. It established a U.S. presence in 1999 and now has about 700 employees.

LBC in 2013When LBC took stock of its terminal facilities in 2013, it identified six major challenges to continued growth and improvement, safety and customer satisfaction.

First, its facilities were saddled with end-of-life process control architectures. “We are a composition of terminals going back to 1947, each with its own issues,” said Zhou. “Systems were built over time by different system integra-tors and could not be integrated. We couldn’t scale our business for growth, and it was becoming harder to find the right expertise to keep the systems going.”

Second, the systems and networks were closed. “They were black boxes with low transparency,” Zhou said. “We couldn’t get our hands on the data, so we couldn’t have enough control over what was happening.”

Third was security. “You must have safety first when handling dangerous goods,” Zhou said. “Our operations technology was not up to par; we had no IT/OT sepa-ration, no patching or updates, no secure topology. We wanted to give access to our service providers, but we didn’t separate them from our internal access.”

Maintainability came fourth. Multiple systems lived together in the same environment: Siemens Cube and

Rockwell Automation, COTAS with Schneider and Honeywell and multiple SCADA systems by Panorama and Ignition. It was difficult to apply integrated mainte-nance on non-integrated systems and was very difficult, if not impossible, to perform release management and version control.

“Maintenance was costly and time-consuming,” Zhou said. “With what we had, it’s almost impossible to have a long-term maintenance strategy or lifecycle planning.”

Availability and business continuity could not be man-aged because “there was no data for preventive main-tenance,” Zhou said. “Spares were hard to plan and couldn’t be rationalized.” Mean time to repair (MTTR) was high due to lack of transparency, data availability and spare part inventory. Operators increasingly used manual overrides to keep operations going.

Finally, the systems did not meet today’s standards. “Each terminal had its own knowledge but couldn’t share it,” Zhou said. “We couldn’t have a regional or global spare parts program and couldn’t apply standards for upgrades.”

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4 simple objectives“Our objectives are driven by two priorities—safety and happy customers,” Zhou said. The first objective is im-proved process safety and asset integrity systems. The sec-ond objective is operational excellence—asset availability and flexibility.

At the same time, LBC sought to get a grip on the third objective, total cost of ownership (TCO). “Our asset life-time is 20-40 years,” Zhou said. “We want to see the cost of the asset over its entire lifetime.”

Finally, the new systems would have to be scalable. “We are growing,” Zhou said. “Whatever we have in place needs to grow with us.”

The four goals were related to seven aspects to be im-proved by new systems:

• Best practice and knowledge sharing• Spare parts inventory• Improved pricing and support• Alignment of configurations and functional flows• Standardized lifecycle management• Global partnership with strategic vendors• Long-term implementation strategy“We want a strategic relationship with global partners,

with a long-term implementation strategy,” Zhou said.The plan for successAgidens helped LBC turn those goals into hardware

and software. De Roeck said, “We started with the foun-dation and governance, based on ISA-95 and -99” for integration and security. They planned to standardize equipment, controls, process and network; focus on IT/OT conversion; and apply ISA-101 for HMI.

The rollout plan uses a phased approach to standardize equipment, controls and processes based on best practice and pilot study. The migration plan is then adapted to terminal needs and customized for each facility.

Agidens and LBC worked together to evaluate poten-tial suppliers, including Emerson, Rockwell Automation and Honeywell.

“We don’t have the infrastructure to do our own con-trols,” Zhou said. With facilities around the world, “we wanted local, long-term support. “We see Rockwell Auto-mation as having best-in-class network topology, and we like the way they think—for example, their approach to

IT/OT convergence matches our way of thinking.”Between 2013 and 2017, LBC, Agidens and Rockwell

Automation converted LBC Rotterdam, Antwerp and CEPSA (Netherlands) facilities to systems based on the PlantPAx DCS. Key enablers were:

• Using Rockwell Automation configuration and selection tools with unmodified libraries. “We didn’t touch them or the SCADA objects, so we wouldn’t have problems with future updates,” said De Roeck.

• Using the PlantPAx System Estimator inside the Integrated Architecture Builder (IAB) tool. “Sys-tem Estimator validates performance, and, if there’s an issue, it indicates a solution,” De Roeck said. “When you’re done, a bill of material comes out, and you can order it.”

• Implementing FactoryTalk AssetCentre. “It per-forms automatic backups for disaster recovery,” De Roeck said. “All changes are identified with who did it and what was changed. It also records opera-tional changes, such as if a valve is put in manual.”

• Using the FactoryTalk Historian SE application. “It provides long-term data storage for a year or more and fast data access,” De Roeck said.

• Replacing Honeywell Experion C200 with Con-trolLogix. “We could do it by just replacing the C200 boards one-to-one but ended up changing the I/O and racks for spare parts rationalization,” De Roeck said. “The racks just come off and the new ones go on. It was done in a couple of hours.”

Migrations were performed on tight schedules with minimal shutdowns, typically less than two days. The re-sult is a set of systems that meet LBC’s expectations. “We now have central governance and much better process safety,” Zhou said. “Better transparency has had a posi-tive impact on asset integrity. Lower MTTR, less down-time and the right spares inventory has improved our cus-tomer service. Our total cost of ownership is under control with mid- and long-term maintenance strategies; we don’t have to be reactive anymore. And we have scalability for our planned expansions. What’s more, the CEPSA facil-ity recently won the global Most Efficient Storage Facility award from Tank Storage Industry magazine.”

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FOOD & BEVERAGE FORUM: MODERN CONTROLS, MORE FRENCH FRIESKraft Heinz plant moves beyond outdated controllers and sur-passes project goals Mike Bacidore

At the Ore-Ida plant in Ontario, Oregon, down-time was affecting production capacity due to network latency issues and legacy control

system reliability. “We had pretty old PLC systems,” explained Danny Branson, project engineer at Kraft Heinz, which owns the Ore-Ida brand. “There were problems getting spares because they were rapidly be-coming obsolete. Justifying the capital investment to modernize control structures was difficult because we needed to define the return on investment of upgrad-ing the aging control systems.” Branson shared the Kraft Heinz story of successful automation modernization at today’s Food & Beverage Industry Forum at Automation Fair in Houston.

Rather than merely replace its obsolete control sys-tems, Kraft Heinz decided to modernize the architec-ture and incorporate new technologies that would help to optimize production capacity and reduce quality variability.

Sitting along the Snake River, which divides Oregon and Idaho, the plant was determined to increase yield, while reducing variation and scrap.

“Most potato processing plants have at least one co-product, lower-volume production line, usually for formed fried products,” said Branson. “Co-product lines allow a plant to obtain higher yields of the raw crop.”

The Ontario plant, which runs 24/7 for between 270 and 310 days each year, has seven production lines, two of which are dedicated to French fry cuts. About 450

hourly employees work production across four shifts. More than a billion pounds of potatoes are used for 150 SKUs producing about 700 million pounds of product.

“Potato processing is a series of processes, some are batching in nature, but many are continuous process control,” explained Branson. At the Ore-Ida plant, the entire process, from unloading potatoes at the dock to packaged/cased product heading for cold storage pallet-izing and logistics takes about 65 minutes.

“We’re thinking our payback will be less than 2 years, and our throughput increase will be 10.4%, more than double the project goal of 5%.” Kraft Heinz’s Danny Branson explained the ROI of control upgrades at the Food & Beverage Industry Forum at Automation Fair this week in Houston.

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Rolling up the sleevesTo address Ore-Ida’s unique needs, the Rockwell Auto-mation team identified an innovative solution to iden-tify process improvements and maximize production us-ing data analytics. The idea was to increase throughput enough for the return on investment (ROI) to cover the cost of the upgrade.

“Our primary goal was to increase production year over year by 5%,” said Branson. “We chose the highest-production-volume fry line to meet the project ROI and ensure project justification.”

Rockwell Automation conducted a front-end engi-neering design (FEED) study to define the scope and ROI for the control system and network infrastructure modernization, as well as model predictive control (MPC) implementation. Rockwell Software Pavilion8 MPC software was used, and it now assesses current and predicted operational data, compares it to the desired re-sult and optimizes process control, explained Branson. “Because it knows what’s coming at it, MPC can predict where it will need to drive the target,” he said. “It knows all of the constraints in our processes—frying, freezing, packaging. MPC looks at the constraints and determines if it can increase throughput.”

MPC is a software package that sits on top of the control system, whether it’s PLCs or DCS, and uti-lizes cross-feedback from the process. Lab data also can be fed into virtual online analyzers. The software can change the setpoints, which frees up the operators to do other things.

Over the course of the project, because executive and corporate management changed three times due to ac-

quisitions, the objectives of increasing capacity, reduc-ing quality variability, improving the use of people and equipment, and modernizing controls and networking were reevaluated each time.

“We committed to a 2.5-year payback based on an es-timated production increase year over year for both the controls upgrade and MPC solution,” said Branson. “We first went after the capital in early 2014 and didn’t imple-ment until 2015.”

Paying for itselfThe Ore-Ida plant is tracking toward an annual cost sav-ings of 11%, Branson explained. “We’re thinking our payback will be less than 2 years, and our throughput in-crease will be 10.4%, more than double the project goal of 5%,” he said. “The ROI provided the opportunity to upgrade the aging control system and modernize plant automation.”

Ore-Ida did suffer some setbacks and delays in the proj-ect. “Make sure you are keeping the equipment in a state of working order,” emphasized Branson. “Preparing sys-tems and equipment is crucial. Repair equipment ASAP. Education about the project to the broader management team and operators is key to ensuring early adoption. Fac-tory management and maintenance also must be com-mitted to maintaining full equipment functionality.”

Ore-Ida experiences a lot of operator turnover, and there is no MPC implementation team on-site. “We have to spend a lot of one-on-one time with the opera-tors and develop specific training,” said Branson. “But, because we have been successful, we are now allocating funding to modify two additional production lines.”

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GET TO THE CORE OF SAFETY AND PRODUCTIVITYProper safety system methods, tools, design and analysis address the risk while providing the value in productivity Dave Perkon

Safety solutions from Rockwell Automation are about making machines safer and more pro-ductive at the same time. There are two parts

to safety productivity. One part includes the tools used during the risk assessment, design and validation phases. The other part is on the actual operations side of things, with smart safety, and there are analytics for that.

“People will pay money to reduce risk, but the payoff is always on the productivity side, which is where the value is,” said Patrick Barry, business development manager at Rockwell Automation during a Safety Solutions booth tour at Automation Fair in Houston. “Rockwell Automa-tion’s safety solution is focused on making a smart ma-chine more productive, more reliable and easier to repair.”

One of the most important things when you start safe-guarding a machine is understanding the human inter-action, continued Barry. “If you don’t understand what operators are doing with the machine, you risk choosing the wrong safety products or using the wrong safeguard,” he said. “If you don’t pick the right safeguard, the risk is it will be used, but the machine productivity will suffer or someone may choose to defeat it.”

This is one of the reasons why Rockwell Automation is pushing the assessment stage of the safeguard process—the first step of the Functional Safety Lifecycle. “This risk assessment needs to be done very early in the de-sign process,” said Steven Ludwig, commercial program manager at Rockwell Automation. “It’s better to design risks out of the machine and create a productive design than to build a machine and then make it safe. The key

is to make the machine as productive as possible while still keeping workers safe.”

Safety toolsRegardless of the safety standard, they all basically use the methodology in the Rockwell Automation Func-tional Safety Lifecycle, said Ludwig. “To help keep cus-tomers from getting stuck in the safety process, Rock-well combines its expertise in safety with hardware and tools,” he explained.

The first step of the Functional Safety Lifecycle is

“More use than expected can reduce product life and may affect the overall reliability of a safety system.” Rockwell Automation’s Patrick Barry explained the ins and outs of safety systems—and how to make machines both safe and productive—at this week’s Automation Fair.

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the risk or safety assessment, for which Rockwell Auto-mation has a software product called Risk Assessment Software Win (RASWin). The RASWin product assists management with the safety process and gives the user consistent documentation at completion. It helps the user to perform a risk assessment on a machine, develop a functional requirements specification and perform safety system validation.

Safety documentation at the completion of a project is also important. “Instead of having homegrown safety documentation, the RASWin tool provides a standard method,” said Ludwig. “If an injury does occur, it can provide due-process documentation. This documentation can also be used as a sales tool, helping the customer to understand the included safety functionality in OEM and custom equipment, a common best-in-class feature. It also helps to make an OEM more self-sufficient in safety, and safety is a driver for operational excellence.”

Following proper safety methods can make a machine more productive, and there are tools to improve design productivity, as well. “These tools reduce the time it takes to design a safety system,” said Barry. “It’s not just the engineer’s time, it’s ensuring that the calculations and safety function are done and implemented properly. It ensures a safety compliant system.”

The RASWin tool works with some other free tools from Rockwell Automation for design, such as Safety Au-tomation Builder, which is used to simplify machine safety design. These tools guide the user though safety-system layout, hardware selection and safety-level analysis.

With the safety system designed, the tools point the way to the company’s pre-engineered safety functions for machines. This includes drawings for use in sche-matics, product configuration and ladder-logic examples and HMI faceplates. These tools and examples reduce development time and costs.

Safety analytics“On the operation side, Rockwell Automation’s safety solution also includes analytics that can help to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) issues, for example, and track uptime on a machine making it more productive,” said Ludwig.

Safety is part of The Connected Enterprise. “From a safety prospective, you have to understand what the ex-pected operation of the machine is, as a first step, and that is done with the risk assessment,” said Ludwig. “With that understood, analytics create usable data, al-lowing you to compare the actual operation with the ex-pected operation to understand compliance, worker be-havior and related activity.”

For example, during risk assessment and design, an assumption for how often a safety door will be opened may be made. “With analytics, we can now determine if the assumption was correct,” said Barry. “More use than expected can reduce product life and may affect the overall reliability of a safety system. With analyt-ics, all safety functions identified during the risk as-sessment are compared to real-world data. If a safety guard isn’t opening when it should be several times a shift, it could indicate that the safety function is being bypassed. If it is being used too much, there may be other issues.”

Productive machine safety“There are alternative measures to lock-out, tag-out pro-cedures,” continued Barry. An example of this was on an automated machine in the Rockwell Automation Safety Solutions booth. The machine included two co-ordinated Fanuc robots with part handling and assembly tooling and is used as a training tool by universities and manufacturers.

“The safety features on the machine were designed to keep the machine both safe and productive,” said Barry. “The design allows operators to interact with the robots in a more productive manner. It demonstrates safe speed and position methods using a Allen-Bradley Guard-Logix controller, SafeZone safety laser scanner and GuardShield safety light curtain on a machine to keep it up and running. The safety laser scanner detects the ap-proach of an operator into a warning area.”

When the operator enters the area, the robots slow down and a warning signal is activated, but the machine remains productive. If the operator continues to ap-proach the machine, interrupting the light curtain, the machine stops.

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WELLSITE CONTROLS TAKE HEAT, DELIVER SAFETYOil and gas specialist Frames integrates PlantPAx DCS and AAD-vance for safe control of wellhead equipment in the Sahara desert Paul Studebaker

As Tunisia has developed economically, the en-ergy-rich North African country transitioned in 2000 from net exporter to net importer of natu-

ral gas. The country’s weak currency and rising prices combined to make this very expensive, so it sought to increase local production.

The country’s Nawara project is designed to increase energy supply by adding nine 4-km-deep natural gas wells in the southern Tunisia Saharan desert, a 370-km pipeline through the center of the country, and a gas plant near the central eastern coast. The project will add reserves of more than 10 billion cubic meters, with peak production of 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boe) per day, approximately 11% of the country’s esti-mated gas consumption.

The overall project is supplied by OMV, with the pro-cessing facility and skid-mounted equipment for the nine wellsites provided by Frames. Frames designs, con-structs and delivers separation, treatment, control and monitoring systems for onshore, offshore, and floating facilities in oil and gas.

Headquartered in Alphen aan Rijn in The Nether-lands, the company has more than 500 employees work-ing in offices worldwide, including one in Houston, site of this week’s Rockwell Automation Process Automa-tion Solutions Group (PSUG) where Thomas de Wolf, Frames product manager for wellsite solutions, pre-sented the session, “Frames flow control and safeguard-ing creates fully-autonomous wellsite skids thanks to PlantPAx DCS.”

Anatomy of a skidSkid equipment starts with a wellhead connection and choke valve to reduce the wellhead pressure from 254 to 58 bar(g). Along with an instrumented flowline, it has a hydraulic unit, a methanol injection system, and con-nections for a sand filter, all handled by an integrated control and safety system.

The components are mounted on a single skid, sized to fit into a shipping container. “Everything that’s re-quired, we build it, ship it down and hook it up,” said Thomas de Wolf, product manager, wellsite solutions,

“The client was concerned about uptime. We need high reliability to meet production requirements.” Thomas de Wolf, product manager, wellsite solutions, Frames, discussed the unique demands of operating unmanned skids in the Saharan dessert.

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Frames. “We have it up and running in a matter of days.”Electric power is scarce and expensive in the desert,

so along with using energy-efficient pumps and cool-ing, “The skids are completely solar-powered, with bat-teries for four days of power,” de Wolf said, as that’s typically the maximum length of a sandstorm. When the sun comes back, “The solar cells are sized to power the skid and recharge the batteries in 17 days.”

The skid is Zone 2-rated for hazardous areas, and the 3,800-Ah, valve-regulated, lead-acid battery set is packaged on a separate skid. “The batteries could be on the skid, but it’s expensive to put them in a hazardous area,” deWolf said.

The daytime desert temperature ranges from 80 °C in sun to 55 °C in the shade, and the cabinet compo-nents are rated for a maximum of 60 °C. Cabinet cool-ing is provided by a passive system—no refrigeration—using heat exchangers inside and outside the cabinet and a heat sink of several hundred gallons of coolant. The liquid cools at night and circulates during the hot part of the day, deWolf said. “It’s not cooled enough to be comfortable, but it’s enough to keep the compo-nents below their maximum design temperature.

Control with safetyThe control and safety systems cover the well tree, hy-draulic power unit, chemical injection, methanol in-jection, choke valve, fast-closing valve, and fire and gas systems, and communicate via an external RTU with an off-site control room.

The project team chose Rockwell Automation tech-nology for both basic process control and safety instru-mented systems (SIS). The basic process control sys-

tem (BPCS) is a PlantPAx DCS with Remote I/O. SIL 3 safety instrumented system functionality is provided by the AADvance control system. “We chose Rockwell Automation because FactoryTalk faceplates are easy to use, and the company provides support when we need it,” deWolf said. “We do all our own programming, but it’s good to have backup.”

With so much equipment in such a remote location, “The client was concerned about uptime,” de Wolf said. “We need high reliability to meet production re-quirements.” Communications are designed to prevent single point of failure, everything is designed to be fail-safe and maintain SIS functionality, and HMI software facilitates maintenance and troubleshooting. “We can zoom into any part of the process, see the logic, and see where errors are starting from,” he added.

The AADvance SIS safety tags are used as inputs to the PlantPAx DCS to allow them to display as face-plates. Sequence of events records are stored on SD cards, “So if we go off and back online, the equipment starts up normally,” de Wolf said. In the event of a com-munication failure, the operator can retrieve the infor-mation from the SD card.

The skids are currently in Tunisia, with installation waiting on resolution of local politics, de Wolf said. “They should be on-site in the second half of 2018.”

Along with the capabilities of the PlantPAx and AADvance systems, Frames chose Rockwell Automa-tion for its hazardous area-rated PLCs, its support, and its ability to provide a “relatively low-cost solution for complete well control,” de Wolf said. “Rockwell is also one of few manufacturers that can handle the desert conditions.”

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OIL & GAS FORUM: ARC LIFTS WELL PERFORMANCECanadian oil & gas company ARC Resources uses ConectedPro-duction Well Manager to optimize artificial lift Jim Montague

How do you recover when your industry’s revenue drops by half—as oil and gas producers experi-enced when prices plummeted from $120 per

barrel to $60 and less in recent years? Very carefully and efficiently—and that means automation.

End users presenting at the Oil & Gas Industry Forum today at the Automation Fair event detailed a variety of ways that they’ve come up with to simplify and streamline their operations and wring some much-needed profit out of their applications and processes.

“The crash in prices during and after 2014 resulted in dramatic reductions in capital and operating expenditures of 70-80%,” says Luis Gamboa, heavy industries market development manager, Rockwell Automation. “However, owner/operators have to keep running, and so they’ve had to find ways to greatly increase efficiency, especially dur-ing the past three years. This can be done with automa-tion, optimization and centralized operations.”

Uplifted by artificial liftFor instance, instead of pumping indiscriminately as was done often in the past, ARC Resources reported that it recently undertook a continuous improvement program, which encouraged it to evaluate and implement the Rock-well Automation ConnectedProduction well manager so-lution to determine when and for how long to employ ar-tificial lift at its multi-well pads in Alberta and northeast British Columbia. The ConnectedProduction solution was designed to maintain efficient production even from aging and otherwise depleted assets.

“We’re always looking for new ways to keep going and continue production on these older wells,” said Charlie Kettner, PLC programmer and control system manager, ARC Resources. “It was also important for us to automate because we can have up to 32 wells per pad with differ-ent combinations of horizontal and directional drilling, and are subject to different pressures and other forces. We wanted one controller to handle all these scalable sys-tems, but we had problems with our older controls. They could measure gases and handle one or two wells, but they weren’t so good when we went to eight or 13 wells per pad.”

“I was able to put in ConnectedProduction Well Manager myself. We started it out on five wells and then added four more.” ARC Resources’ Charlie Kettner on the company’s easy implementation of Rockwell Automation’s solution for managing artificial lift on its production assets.

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After consulting with Rockwell Automation, Kettner decided to use its ConnectedProduction Well Manager program, which enabled ARC to increase its I/O point count, expand its SCADA system, and adopt Control-Logix PLCs and ProSoft support modules.

“I told our production engineers to test this solution on a well while I checked it in our lab, and we found it was plug-and-play out of the box,” explained Kettner. “I was able to put it in myself, and we started it out on five wells and then added four more. We’ve also got more space to expand our I/O, but we didn’t have to replace or rewire our existing hardware.”

Kettner added that ConnectedProduction Well Man-ager’s valve-open and valve-close criteria are more ad-justable by ARC’s operators, which lets them pick and more easily implement the setpoints they want to run. “These decisions are based on the operating philoso-phy the team has for each well,” he said. “Previously, we might hit a button, but then forget to close that valve later. Now, it’s done automatically, which saves on oper-ating expenditures. ConnectedProduction is also more standardized, so we can move operators around more easily. Plus, there’s no more custom code, so we don’t have differences in programming.”

OILFIELD SOLUTION STREAMLINES ASSET INTEGRATIONRockwell Automation ConnectedProduction solution reduces time to production, lower costs and helps oil & gas producers thrivePaul Studebaker

I had to wonder what a full-sized oilfield pump jack was doing in a Rockwell Automation trade show ex-hibit focused on networking and software. I mean, I

hear Texans will drill anywhere, but in the middle of the George R. Brown convention center?

“ConnectedProduction is to local equipment instal-lations what The Connected Enterprise is to the overall business: a system for gathering data, analyzing it, and turning it into actionable information where and when it’s needed,” explained Marcus Toffolo, global business manager, oil and gas, Rockwell Automation. I chewed on that bite of word salad as Toffolo began our tour of the section of The Connected Enterprise (TCE) Industries Pavilion devoted to process industries at Automation Fair this week in Houston.

“Food and beverage, chemical, and oil and gas indus-tries must meet demand, quality and safety requirements,”

Toffolo said. “Oil and gas prices have driven the need to be more competitive, to lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Then there’s the aging workforce, so it’s not all about cost, we also need to do more with fewer people.”

For ConnectedProduction, Rockwell Automation brings many systems and solutions together. The equipment may be disparate in type and location, and a mix of new and brownfield. “We have the organizational strength, from in-telligent power and PlantPAx (DCS) to motor control cen-ters and OEM skids, to bring information from equipment together and reduce costs in any size plant or installation,” Toffolo said. “This capability is scalable from a single smart drive to an entire production facility.”

ConnectedProduction in the fieldFor example, a wellhead or oilfield compressor can be a smart asset. With intelligence at the edge, operators can

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“Imagine that quality of data across hundreds of assets, thousands of times, with no need for data cleaning.” Rockwell Automation’s Marcus Toffolo discussed how the company’s ConnectedProduction solution dramatically streamlines the integration of data flows among smart field assets.

control a motor, reduce energy consumption, or limit a temperature rise. They can control locally, and the asset can connect to the enterprise so operations can be moni-tored and optimized at higher levels.

The asset may not be on a SCADA system or even have a cellular connection, so local and edge analytics are im-portant. Then data can be contextualized, and the critical information can be sent on up.

“Here, we have a typical piece of oilfield equipment, a pump jack,” said Toffolo, gesturing at the aforementioned hulk of steel. “See the QR code on the pump arm? A mo-bile technician can drive into Bluetooth range, scan that code and download the operating data from the jack. It may be minus 30 degrees outside—he doesn’t have to get out of the truck. There may be maintenance to be done, or a work order associated with that code. He can down-load that, as well as the instructions. “

The data will have information about the well produc-tivity, which goes up to the enterprise system and to a sub-ject matter expert (SME) where it will be combined with information from the other 50 wells in the field and used to determine water/oil ratios, choke settings, strokes, and injections to optimize the group.

Moving on, we come to an OptiLift NF natural gas flow controller, a package solution that can be con-nected, but is also self-sufficient, with an HMI for local control. If communications are unavailable or go down, it stores time-stamped data, then backfills the records on reconnection. “Automatic data collection replaces chart recorders and clipboards,” Toffolo said. “It can upload to mobile devices that move the data up when they return to a cellular or WiFi network—complete data, with no transcription errors.

“Imagine that quality of data across hundreds of assets, thousands of times, with no need for data cleaning.”

Next, we visit an OptiLift RPC rod pump controller. This is a “self-declaring asset,” said Toffolo. On connec-

tion and power-up, it auto-identifies, asks to be connected to the production system, and offers its setpoints, ranges and variables. “You just give it a name, and it’s on the sys-tem, automatically connected to ERP and SAP asset man-agement systems, ready for maintenance and work order generation, and to accept optimization instructions.”

Then we stopped by an FW Murphy compressor con-trol panel, “another smart asset,” Toffolo said. We can monitor it, see how it’s operating—temperatures, pres-sures, incipient surge—and if indicated, modify the well behavior remotely to prevent a problem. “If needed, we might slow production a bit to avoid a trip,” Toffolo said.

A nearby UMC lease automatic custody transfer (LACT) metering skid monitors flows, temperatures, pres-sures and compositions to determine dollar values based on quality. “This information also flows back through ConnectedProduction, where the company can allocate production to particular wells, know sand and gas ratios, and optimize the reservoir at the cloud level,” Toffolo said.

Five minutes, seven clicksFinally, we see a configuration, monitoring and control demonstration, where Srikanth Mashetty, engineering manager, Digital Oilfield Solutions, Rockwell Automa-tion, showed how SMEs, operators and technicians can

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collaborate across responsibilities.As he talks, a new smart asset is powered on and pops

up on the screen. It could be anything, and this time it’s a wellhead. Mashetty acknowledges it with a click, and it de-scribes itself as a data model in AssetPoint. Whether there are 50 or 800, it knows its tags, as well as its location, both physically and in the control hierarchy. Mashetty gives it its name, and it’s automatically in the ERP, analytics and asset management systems, giving trending, displays and alarms. Five minutes, seven clicks, and one data entry.

“In the past, that would have taken at least half an hour, and as long as several weeks,” said Toffolo.

On a nearby screen, Schlumberger software shows the new well automatically added to a map of an existing field, where Riku Vilkki, BDMS solution champion, Sch-

lumberger Information Solutions, describes how he can schedule it and use its trending and history for field per-formance optimization.

The tour has shown just one example, in one industry, of how ConnectedProduction and The Connected En-terprise draw on the depth of Rockwell Automation and partner technologies to enable OEMs and end users to “collect data, perform analytics where they’re needed, and present the results to the right person,” said Elizabeth Par-kinson, director, market development, The Connected Enterprise, Rockwell Automation. Alongside the data flows, collaboration tools like the FactoryTalk TeamOne app allow operators and technicians to “phone a friend”—an SME—to work together, share information and solve problems quickly and efficiently.

MACHINE & EQUIPMENT BUILDERS INDUSTRY FORUM: BUILT FOR SPEED AND AGILITY Consumer trends continue to direct requirements for packaging machinesMike Bacidore

Few industries are affected by consumer trends as much as the food and beverage industry. That influence travels from those consumer goods

companies all the way up to the packaging machinery builders who design the equipment that fills the contain-ers and then packages them for shipment.

Some of the key trends affecting food and beverage include production personalization, overall efficiency, increasing consumer expectations, value-chain restruc-turing, green strategies and food safety.

Companies expect their packaging equipment to help them to address those trends. Gebo Cermex, a French manufacturer of packaging and palletizing solutions, has developed its CareSelect system with Rockwell Au-

tomation technology to do just that for bottling.“The value of the system is when the customer needs

flexibility and has high changeover frequency,” ex-plained Didier Saussereau, product manager, Gebo Cermex, who spoke during the Machine & Equipment Builders (OEMs) Industry Forum at the Automation Fair event this week in Houston. “High-speed, frequent changeovers and a large diversity of products make the machine valuable.”

Gebo Cermex is part of the Tetra Laval Group, which has 33,860 employees and more than 37,000 pieces of equipment installed in 190 countries. Gebo Cermex and its sister business unit, Sidel, work together to un-derstand customers’ needs as part of the group vision.

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“The value of the system is when the customer needs flexibility and has high changeover frequency.” Didier Saussereau sang the praises of Gebo Cermex’ award-winning machine design this week at Automation Fair in Houston.

“The production plant is our playground,” said Sau-ssereau. “We build equipment from the processing phase through the primary packaging down to the ter-tiary packaging and material handling. Forty percent of our machines are robotic case packers.”

Digitalization is key to accelerating mass customiza-tion of goods. To make food and beverage manufac-turing plants more agile, Gebo Cermex developed its Agility 4.0 program, a move that pushes plants toward Industrie 4.0 objectives and helps to make the smart manufacturing plant of tomorrow a reality.

Customization and increased responsiveness reflect consumer behaviors that influence their purchasing de-cisions. This in turn improves line operations in terms of speed, efficiency, flexibility and versatility.

Agility 4.0 is a clear-direction strategy that will con-tinue to grow in importance, explained Saussereau. It contains five pillars:

1. Virtual factory solution—includes visual design through logistics

2. Smart factory—enables customers by including machine systems and data intelligence for robot-ics and communication hardware (CareSelect is part of this initiative)

3. Connected factory—includes digital connectivity4. Sustainable factory—within a philosophy of sus-

tainable production5. Extended factory—total master of the factory be-

yond the four wallsThe Gebo Cermex CareSelect module addresses

one of the major issues that producers are facing—mass customization demands. It is compatible with any bot-tle shape and dimension and includes a collating mod-ule. The system takes product protection and integrity to a higher level, and is based on Rockwell Automation iTRAK technology.

The iTRAK configuration includes a power supply, an

Allen-Bradley Kinetix 5500 servo drive communicat-ing over EtherNet/IP, CompactLogix 5380 controller, Stratix 5700 industrial managed Ethernet switch, gate-way and PanelView Plus 7 graphic terminal.

“Why did we choose iTRAK?” asked Saussereau. “The model chosen allows it to respond to efforts from 37 to 88 N of peak force.” The dynamic forces of acceleration, the robustness of the system, and lim-ited contact with the bottles were also important con-siderations.

“Contact with the bottle was for 0.3 seconds,” ex-plained Saussereau. “We eliminated contact between bottles. Friction was reduced by 20 times. CareSelect easily guarantees perfect bottle integrity. All shapes of bottles can be accommodated.”

Most importantly, CareSelect can fully automatically adjust the system to a new format in less than a minute. “The speed is up to 400 bottles/minute, and no part stor-age is needed,” said Saussereau.

The CareSelect machine was awarded the Modular Machine award at the Interpack 2017 expo. Sponsored by Rockwell Automation, the winner was determined by a judging panel comprising many packaging equipment users, including Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Kimblery-Clark and Nestlé.

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STEM BOOTH SPARKS FUTURE ENGINEERS“Engineering Our Future” booth highlights invest by Rockwell Automation in next-gen technical professionals Jim Montague

Because most engineers aren’t just born that way, the individuals who will support indus-try tomorrow need active and continuous cul-

tivation. This is why Rockwell Automation has been ramping up its investment and participation in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs for years to inspire and nurture the coming generations of technical professionals, who will replace their rap-idly retiring predecessors.

Because new engineers won’t just be needed tomorrow or next week, but for years and decades to come, Rock-well Automation and all STEM programs seek to attract youngsters from high school down to kindergarten with For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Tech-nology (FIRST) Robotics competition for 9-12 graders, FIRST Tech Challenge for 7-12 graders, FIRST Lego League for 4-6 graders, and FIRST Lego League Junior for K-3 graders.

At its earliest stages, FIRST lets 5-6-year-old play with block programming tools. “Just as it’s easier to learn a language when you’re young, it’s easy to learn engineer-ing concepts at an early age,” explained Jay Flores, global STEM ambassador for Rockwell Automation.

Multiple layers, many skillsThis multi-pronged approach was on full display at the “Engineering Our Future” booth on the exhibit floor this week at the Automation Fair event in Houston, where FIRST mentors and local student teams show-cased their robotics activities and skills for the thousands of attendees visiting the show floor.

The full-sized competition space featured a mobile, rolling, wirelessly networked robot named Nautilus, which was built and programmed by Cryptonite Team

624 from Cinco Ranch High School in nearby Katy, Texas, which collected and launched plastic balls into a “boiler” container and also put large plastics gears onto pegs. The robot uses several Rockwell Automation tech-nologies, including a CompactLogix controller, Stratix 5400 Ethernet switch and ArmorBlock I/O modules.

“Our STEM efforts—including my position that lets me do it full time—combine our passion with our need to develop more engineers and technicians and grow our industry,” said Flores. “The main focus of Rockwell Au-tomation’s philanthropy is education, and the main focus within that is STEM. We want to convince kids and their families that engineering and manufacturing are cool.” Flores added that he’s part of the company’s overall tal-ent effectiveness organization, which maintains univer-sity relations, focuses on talent acquisition, and seeks to maximize the impact of Rockwell Automation’s philan-thropic commitments.

Math and the right questionsSupplementing the FIRST programs, the “Engineering Our Future” booth also included a Spatial Temporal Math (ST Math) area, which provided visual and inter-active mathematics activities to youngsters in 8th grade and younger, so they can develop more of the math abili-ties needed in STEM and other disciplines.

“Kids can be inspired by STEM, but ST Math gives them some of the math-ready skills they’ll need along the way,” added Flores. “ST Math hosts family math nights for kids and their parents, and seeks to break the stereo-type that it’s OK not to be a math person.”

The key to getting kids interested in STEM, math and other technical subjects is to start when they’re very young, added Flores, but he emphasized it’s also cru-

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cial to maintain their excitement and interest over the long term. “We can do this by providing a safe space for STEM, and remind them that it’s OK to fail and try again—which is a central principle of all kinds of engi-neering,” explained Flores. “Too often, kids are told to stop asking ‘why,’ and they do—even though it’s probably the most important engineering question of all.”

Anuraag Routray, 10th grader at Cinco Ranch High School, added, “We built our Nautilus robot from scratch and parts, and it’s new challenges like this and how the games change that keeps my interest. I’m planning go into mechanical engineering.”

More than robotsEven as it draws more students to engineering and tech-nical fields, Flores added that another of FIRST’s recent priorities is to communicate that it’s “more than robots,” and that engineering includes all kinds of problem solv-ing in many other fields, too.

“For instance, Lego League’s annual theme for this year was ‘water,” and so the kids and their teams were asked to identify water-related problems in their regions, such as sanitation or preservation, or even droughts in California or excessive lead in Michigan, and then try to come up with solutions for them,” explained Flores. “The ideas and solutions many come up with remind me why I don’t like the title ‘future engineers’ for FIRST participants because they’re practicing real engineering right now. Many FIRST judges have said, ‘No way you’re this young!’ I think some of the older teams even have patents, and have already talked to more professors than I did at the college I attended.”

Now that many STEM programs like FIRST and

others have been established for years, Flores reported they’re producing graduates, interns and employees for many companies. “One of our top mentors in the Mil-waukee area said he knew that his STEM efforts were successful when he realized that one of his former STEM students was not only a colleague at his company now, as well as a STEM mentor, but was also speaking more during the call than he was,” he said.

In fact, to encourage more Rockwell Automation employees to serve as mentors, the company offers sponsorship funding to teams with company person-nel onboard. “So far, we’ve sponsored more than 200 teams, which means we also have more than 200 STEM mentors on staff,” added Flores. “Most are in the Milwaukee and Cleveland areas, but we’ve also got teams across the U.S., and worldwide, especially in Mexico and Australia. We’re also supporting FIRST events in Singapore, India, Latin America, Asia-Pa-cific and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). We’re also encouraging our partners, distributor and customers to become mentors.”

“Too often, kids are told to stop asking ‘why,’ and they do—even though it’s probably the most important engineering question of all.” Rockwell Automation’s Jay Flores serves as global STEM ambassador, nurturing the company’s investments in future generations of technical professionals.

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POWER & ENERGY MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY FORUM: MODERNIZATION WITHOUT INTERRUPTION Upgrading five different manufacturers’ control systems to Rock-well Automation hardware improved a power generation facility’s process and production support. Dave Perkon

If your power generation and transmission facili-ties are where wind power is on the rise, you know how important it is to be flexible, and ready to ramp.

Such was the case at Tri-State Generation and Trans-mission (G&T), which has 3.8 GW of capacity over a four-state region, with 1,600 employees and $1.4 billion annual revenue. It’s also a wholesale supplier to 43 elec-tric co-ops. “The region receives significant production from wind turbines,” said Andy Dieball, vice president of sales, EthosEnergy. “Since the wind can fluctuate, the key for Tri-State is for the power generation to be highly available, and quick to ramp.”

EthosEnergy is an independent turbomachinery ser-vice provider. Dieball’s group is focused on turboma-chinery controls, the brains of gas and steam turbines. The group is essentially a Rockwell Automation sys-tem integrator for turbomachinery control within a large company, with other groups focusing on the mechanical aspects. The company does about $1 bil-lion in annual revenue with 4,500 employees, and the group has completed over 900 turbomachinery control system upgrades.

EthosEnergy provided services to upgrade Tri-State G&T’s JM Shafer Generating Station, a 5x2 combined-cycle plant in Fort Lupton, Colo., a small army commu-nity north of Denver. Dieball discussed the challenges of upgrading an obsolete control system, and how automa-tion was used to give the plant a competitive advantage in his presentation to attendees of the Power and Energy

Management Industry Forum at Automation Fair this week in Houston.

“The plant uses five GE LM6000-PA gas turbines pro-viding a total of almost 300 MW output,” Dieball said. Based on a GE flight engine, the turbines are relatively small, but are highly flexible and fast. “These nimble gas turbines can reach full load in eight minutes, and exhaust through two Nooter/Eriksen heat-recovery steam genera-tors (HRSGs) to feed two ABB STAL steam turbines.”

Obsolete control structure“The overall plant control system at Tri-State was a Bai-ley Infi90, obsolete for many years,” said Dieball. “The gas turbines were run using Woodward Netcon gas tur-bine controllers. The steam turbines used Unitrol control-lers. There were also several Rockwell PLC-5 controllers for HRSG duct burners, with Emerson Ovation for plant HMI. It was quite a patchwork of control systems.”

All these different major control systems presented challenges, and the plant was approaching 20 years in operation with existing control systems no longer supported by the OEMs. “The obsolescence of plant systems became a major source of risk,” said Dieball. “Tri-State’s tolerance for risk was very low, so it desired to eliminate risk and to adopt a common control sys-tem platform.”

The plant owner also wanted to continue to produce power during installation. “The plant couldn’t be shut down for 60 days,” said Dieball. “This made things more

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“The hardest part of the project was interfacing to the older systems to continue to generate power during each phase.” Andy Dieball of EthosEnergy oversaw the stem-to-stern modernization of power plant controls for Tri-State Generation & Transmission—all without interrupting electricity production.

complex, with new systems needing to communicate with old systems.”

Detailed design, tight scheduleEthosEnergy used a thin client concept for HMI, and included a Stratus ftServer to do all the heavy lifting for the FactoryTalk SE HMIs. FactoryTalk Historian and SQL server, and a redundant network rounded out con-trol room, with 16 displays running as thin clients.

The balance of the plant was upgraded from Bailey Infi90 I/O to redundant ControlLogix hardware from Rockwell Automation. Using prefabricated I/O cables sim-plified installation and commissioning, as de-termination and re-termination of field wiring was not required.

“The first upgrade project was the gas turbine con-trol,” said Dieball. “It was the most difficult task, as the turbines are very quick. They could run away or stall very quickly. The system uses a ControlLogix controller mounted in the turbine cabinet with a local HMI, power monitor and auto-synchronizer.”

Flex I/O was mounted in an on-engine control cabinet used for field wiring. “It communicates with the control-ler via redundant ControlNet,” said Dieball. “This I/O connects to servo position controllers used to set the vari-able geometry, fuel valve and steam valve. It also provides an interface to existing voltage regulator, generator pro-tection, vibration monitoring, fire and gas detection and engine instrumentation.”

The steam turbine control had similar hardware to the gas turbine control, but was much simpler. Most of the steam turbine control was mounted in the control room.

“Scheduling was where the complexity of the proj-ect came,” said Dieball. “Tri-State wanted to minimize downtime during installation, so a phased approach was implemented to ensure power generation during the project. There were four phases: gas turbine, steam tur-bine, HRSG control upgrade, and balance-of-plant con-

trol system plus plant HMI.”In the first three phases, the new control system needed

to communicate to the existing balance-of-plant control-ler and plant HMI. “The hardest part of the project was interfacing to the older systems to continue to generate power during each phase,” said Dieball.

Why Rockwell and EthosEnergy“EthosEnergy demonstrated to us that they have a turn-

key solution for our gas turbine packages,” said Richard Rhoads, plant manager at JM Shafer Station. “They ad-opted the Rockwell Automation platform, with its massive installed base that was proven in use and would be sup-ported for longer than the life of our plant assets. It gave us the confidence that they would be able to deploy their solu-tion in a timely fashion and minimize our risk. It was clear to us that they had a process that would accomplish that.”

EthosEnergy completed the project on time while meeting Tri-State requirements for continuous power generation. The new control system improved the plant ramp rates from 20 MW/minute to 30 MW/ minute, which enabled Tri-State to take advantage of rapidly changing market demand driven by wind generation.

“A lesson learned is that the ftServer required extra work related to network bandwidth and memory allo-

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cation,” said Dieball. “It’s important to pay attention to memory consumption when using a thin-client HMI sys-tem, and Rockwell Automation has many resources to help deal with it. Their software tools also made it easy to provide data, and to monitor the network in real time to detect breaches or unauthorized access, which helped manage NERC compliance.”

Imagine the training manual for a 300 MW power plant run by five different manufacturers of controllers, suggested Dieball. “I wouldn’t want to write that manual

or be a technician responsible for keeping the plant run-ning,” he said. “Upgrading to a single-manufacturer con-trol system by Rockwell Automation was a huge advan-tage in terms of training.”

Tri-State specifically commented on the RSLogix 5000 environment, the user-friendly tools, and the large library of function blocks available to them. “With the training we provided, they were able to tackle any mini-projects that came up without outside help, as well as sys-tem changes when needed,” said Dieball.

RUN ANALYTICS WHERE THEY MAKE MOST SENSEData often doesn’t have to go to the cloud for context and usefulness Mike Bacidore

Information is power. Everyone wants to be smart. And in the context of manufacturing, more infor-mation means that smarter end users and OEMs

can assure equipment reliability and optimize produc-tion. Machinery generates data and lots of it. But that data means nothing without the analytics to turn it into useful information to make manufacturing smarter and more profitable.

Sometimes the analytics need to take place locally at the edge, where the data is generated and the actuation oc-curs. Other times, they’re better suited to the cloud where data from multiple sources can be fused for analysis. Scal-ing that ability is an important focus of Rockwell Automa-tion, and it was showcased in The Connected Enterprise booth at the Automation Fair event this week in Houston.

“It’s simplicity,” explained Paula Puess, global market development manager, information solutions, at Rock-well Automation. “I like the effort we’re putting into simplifying the act of analytics for our customers. We’re

making data easier to ingest by putting in tools that au-tomatically orchestrate. We’re putting that data together through fusion tools.”

Data comes from everywhere, Puess said. “It can be data from the control environment, MES, ERP or lab system,” she explained. “That is the beauty of the sys-tem. We have tools that go out and inventory Rockwell Automation equipment, if your data is coming from a network source. But it could be coming from a spread-sheet. It could be structured or unstructured data.”

Scalability is the next big thing, said Puess. “We’ve built applications at the device level,” she explained. “You don’t want to always send your data up to the cloud and back. Anyone can put in data connectors that will go and get data and add it to a larger data set.”

In addition to device- and cloud-level analytics, Rock-well Automation has scalable computing options that fall at a number of points in between. “We’re putting things in the rack,” said Puess. “We’re creating gateways at all

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“You don’t want to always send your data up to the cloud and back.” Rockwell Automation’s Paula Puess explained the scalability of the company’s smart manufacturing solutions at Automation Fair this week in Houston.

different levels and making those gateways smart. They transport and transact the data through enterprise gate-ways, which are smart gateways that give the data context without human intervention, without remapping.”

The Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Platform, Proj-ect Scio, for example, ingests data from a range of data sources, bringing it into an orchestration layer where it can start to see commonalities among data sets.

“The orchestration layer allows me to fuse these data sets together,” explained Puess. “One might be labor, and one might be production on a given line. I can bring these data sets together in one click, and Scio will auto-matically create a set of dashboards, which we call story-boards, sort of like Excel will recommend a chart style for you.” The Scio platform also has persona-based security, so access can be granted to, say, the operations group, rather than a specific person.

Get connectedThe Rockwell Automation connected offering also in-cludes FactoryTalk Analytics for Machines. “This solu-tion takes machine data including health and diagnos-tics through a gateway to our FactoryTalk cloud and back to the OEM,” explained Puess. “The OEM can start to see performance trends across machines. This also gives the end user a way to specify smart machines

connected to our cloud, which secures the data.”End users, too, can choose to have their machines

monitored by FactoryTalk Analytics for Machines. “The end user doesn’t have to worry about every machine coming in with a different cloud application,” said Puess. “We move them into a services model and create the in-frastructure. The analytics are purpose-driven.”

Rockwell Automation also has introduced a new con-sulting group to help customers to develop their analytics goals. “They’re doing modernization and other efforts,” said Puess. “A lot of our customers don’t know where to start.” And with Rockwell Automation’s connected ser-vices offering, end users and OEMs “can be as involved with their analytic solution as they want to be.”

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PULP & PAPER INDUSTRY FORUM: DESPERATELY SEEKING NANO-SENSORSReal-time, in situ analysis of tiny particles needed to advance nanocellulose manufacturing Dave Perkon

FiberLean Technologies was formed to bring to market micro-fibrillated cellulose (MFC), a new class of renewable and sustainable nano-

cellulosic engineered material with the potential to de-liver improved performance and value to a wide range of consumer and industrial applications.

The raw materials are natural and abundant, and the final product is extremely strong and lightweight, accord-ing to Sean Ireland, vice president of business develop-ment at FiberLean. “It can be stronger than Kevlar in some cases and lighter than carbon fiber,” Ireland said.

But manufacturing these new nanomaterials presents a number of challenges in the realms of real-time mon-itoring and quality control, Ireland added. He spoke about MFC and its manufacture at the Pulp & Paper Industry Forum this week at the Automation Fair event. “FiberLean Technologies is working to expand pro-cesses and applications of the technology, but innova-tion will be needed on many levels.”

FiberLean is passionate about nanocellulose. “It’s our livelihood, and we are good at what we do,” said Ireland. “Basically, we take minerals and pulp or cellulous of some form and put it into a highly modified, technical grinding system, and out comes the product,” said Ireland. “There is no pretreatment and no added chemicals.”

“The days of making paper at a paper mill are slowly changing,” commented Ireland. “Paper mills are going to become bio-refineries to a certain extent.

They will be making multiple products for multiple industries. There is a large pipeline of new products on the way.”

Nano particles at mega scale“We don’t make MFC in kilograms, we make it in tons,” continued Ireland. “We produce it economi-cally, performance is great and quality assurance is top-notch. However, we still have some issues.”

“The problem is we are only looking at a small, nano-size sample from a 150,000-gallon tank of the finished material.” Sean Ireland of FiberLean Technologies on the need for real-time instrumentation to monitor the manufacture of nanocellulosic materials.

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For example, sensors capable of doing real-time qual-ity measurements during the manufacture of MFC don’t yet exist. Instead, FiberLean has to infer quality parameters post-production using expensive technology such as scanning electron microscopy, atomic force mi-croscopy and thermo-gravimetrical analysis.

“The problem is we are only looking at a small, nano-size sample from a 150,000-gallon tank of the finished material,” said Ireland. “With such small samples, the control has to be perfect. The sample and what’s in the tank need to be exactly the same. Any small variations can completely change the product.”

“As we are grinding and producing the material, we may get the particle size perfect with proper size distribu-tion and surface area,” said Ireland. “But, if the particle

shape changes in the process, you end up with two totally different materials that perform differently. As controls engineers, we need to understand the process very well in order to control it. Small variances at this scale lead to large differences in product quality and performance.”

Real-time analysis on the industrial scale is still not here yet, continued Ireland. “It doesn’t exist, but it needs to happen,” he said. “We are looking for that. If you have any knowledge base in that area, we want to work with you.

From a process control and chemical engineering perspective, one needs to know quantum through me-soscale physics of the manufacturing process, said Ire-land. ”You’ve got to be aware of event small changes; they can’t be ignored at these small sizes.”

TALENT SHORTAGE DRIVES DIVERSITY INITIATIVESRockwell Automation creates a culture of inclusion, earning the 2017 Catalyst Award Mike Bacidore

The journey of Rockwell Automation to build an inclusive culture and more diverse organization began long ago. Still a work in progress, the au-

tomation giant’s transformation earned it the 2017 Cata-lyst Award, which recognizes innovative organizational initiatives that address the recruitment, development and advancement of women.

At Rockwell Automation, the push for inclusion and diversity began in earnest some 10 years ago to address to a growing shortage of workers with necessary skills. “This is a talent agenda,” said Susan Schmitt, senior vice president of human resources, Rockwell Automa-tion, in her address to the Automation Fair Industry Fo-rum focused on the topic of Inclusion & Diversity in

Manufacturing this week in Houston. “Every company cares about talent, and the opportunity we have is to create a company that attracts and keeps talent.”

Over the next decade there will be a billion new peo-ple in the middle class, adding $8 trillion in consumer spending to the global economy, said Schmitt. “Mean-while, the war for talent will get even more challeng-ing. Twenty-one percent or 2.5 million manufacturing workers will retire in the next eight years in the United States. 75% of employers say new skills will be required over the next two years. How do we find great talent and bring it into the organization? We must be thinking about how we recruit and retain talent. The challenge is not only how you hire great talent, but how you keep it.”

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“The war for talent is going to get even more challenging.” Rockwell Automation’s Susan Schmitt explained how the company’s search for talent has driven inclusion and diversity initiatives.

Diversity by the numbersWomen make up 47% of the population, but they com-prise only 29% of the manufacturing workforce, added Schmitt. To make matters worse, a survey revealed that 33% of females trained as engineers left those roles be-cause of industry’s exclusive culture. And only 23% of senior roles are held by women. The same goes for un-derrepresented minority groups.

“For organizations that have more women and mi-norities in leadership roles, those companies perform 35% better from a financial standpoint,” said Schmitt.

With such sunny financial forecasts, what organiza-tion wouldn’t want to break down the walls of board-rooms traditionally dominated by white men? Schmitt shared five compelling reasons to choose inclusion:

1. Talent—employee attraction and retention2. Greater innovation and better decision-making3. Relevance—customers are becoming more di-

verse4. Greater productivity—if people don’t feel they

have equal opportunity, they’re not as productive5. Financial evidence—diverse teams outperform

less diverse teams

Let’s get to work“A lot of technology companies are investing a lot of money to create more diversity,” said Schmitt. “But are they spending their money on actions that will make a difference?” Some approaches work, and some simply exacerbate the problem. “Most companies with good in-tentions are making things worse,” explained Schmitt. “Looking to the minority groups for the answers doesn’t work. It makes them feel frustrated.”

What doesn’t work:• Leaving white men out• Lack of business ownership• Viewing diversity as a problem

• Traditional programs; and • Assimilation culture—trying to assimilate against

the dominant dynamic is a waste of talent.What does work:• Inclusion as a business imperative—it’s a talent

agenda• Understanding the dynamics of culture—domi-

nant/subordinated/systemic privilege• Executives who personalize the work• Critical dialogue and commitment to actionRockwell Automation exit interviews of individuals

leaving the organization revealed that the company had to do better, Schmitt said. “60% said it could have been prevented,” Schmitt said. “Of underrepresented mi-norities, 48% said it could have been prevented.” That meant opportunity.

“We brought in an outside company that did some amazing work,” explained Schmitt. “We wanted to raise the level of understanding. When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we talk about the different groups, but we never talk about white men. They think of themselves as individuals, not members of a group. But white men are part of a group. It’s called the domi-nant group. When you understand the dynamic be-tween the dominant group and non-dominant groups,

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you understand the dominant group has access to priv-ilege and power.”

Roll out the program“Over a four-year period, we talked to about 1,200

employees and got an idea of what the barriers were,” explained Michele Matthai, director, culture of inclu-sion, Rockwell Automation. “Then they created inclu-sion change teams, and those groups were chartered with fixing the barriers to inclusion.”

Many of the sales organization’s networking events, for example, were similar, being centered around golf events or in sports bars. With the new awareness, those events started to broaden to things such as charity events or painting activities. “These events started broadening

our perspectives on things,” said Matthai. “The more inclusive we are, the more we can broaden our perspec-tives and get to better solutions.”

The inclusion change teams started addressing bar-riers. “But it’s not a one-time thing,” added Matthai. “It’s an ongoing willingness to ask questions, be curious and connect with each other. Maybe it’s starting a staff meeting with an inclusion moment. Over time, we real-ized there were things we could do on a much broader basis. We’re training managers on a daily basis, whether it’s hiring, coaching or developing. We customize that training to make sure it’s relevant to all of our leaders all over the world. We’ve seen a major transformation over the past 10 years, and now we’re looking for ways to make inclusion part of our DNA.”

CHEMICAL/SPECIALTY CHEMICAL INDUSTRY FORUM: PROJECT PLANNING MEANS PROFITSeeking process improvement opportunities during a project’s definition and design stages—and performing opportunity assess-ments—can pay off handsomely later for little or no cost Jim Montague

Even compared to all the latest software, cloud services, big data and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promising big money, simply

planning ahead can do the most to optimize operations, improve productivity and increase profits, according to the system integration experts at Maverick Technolo-gies, which is a Rockwell Automation company.

Despite the usual cost constraints, market pressures and regulatory requirements, “Many high-volume com-modity chemical manufacturers and low-volume chem-ical producers are benefiting from recent upticks in their project numbers and individual markets, which are being aided by flat prices and a glut of natural gas,

which is a key building block of ethylene used to make many chemicals,” reported Brian Batts, proposal and es-timating group manager at Maverick, and Chuck Toth, business development manager at Maverick.

Batts and Toth presented “Best practices and how to maximize the benefits of your next automation up-grade” at the Chemical/Specialty Chemical Industry Fo-rum at the Automation Fair event this week in Houston.

Seek advantages soon“All of a sudden, many users are finding they can do more capital expenditure (CapEx) projects, but we rec-ommend that they don’t simply migrate the code they

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had before, and instead look at all the efficiencies they might be able to gain, whether it’s from finally rip-ping and replacing obsolete equipment or just shutting down for four to eight hours to do a simpler upgrade,” said Toth. “There’s billions of dollars of legacy hardware out there and millions of I/O points that need to be mi-grated, but rather than just replace what they have to, a CapEx project can be an op-portunity to take advantage of some new technologies, and address some longstanding problems.

“These opportunities can include rationalizing and eliminating nuisance alarms, which might cause opera-tors to ignore serious problems in the future, or upgrad-ing to grayscale HMI displays that can reduce operator fatigue and improve awareness.”

Batts and Toth added that many manufacturers are trying to produce more diverse chemical formulations, such as specialized coatings and plastics to meet con-sumer demands, by using existing equipment with con-trols and bolt-on software. “The loop from consumers to producers is faster, too,” said Batts. “Where most chemical producers didn’t relate to consumers much in the past, they now have to respond to demands for prod-ucts with no BPA in them.”

Early equals inexpensiveTo identify and take advantage of opportunities during automation upgrades and routine operations, these ef-forts must be carried out during the three main stages of any project, and earlier is always less costly and sim-pler, and later is always more costly and complex. These stages are:

• Definition: The early planning and scope iden-tification stage. “Our motto is, ‘Don’t replicate, innovate,’” said Batts. “This means asking, what opportunities can I take advantage of since we’re

already planning a CapEx project?” The defini-tion stage also includes three front-end loading (FEL) phases: FEL 1 for identifying business needs; FEL 2 for technical selection; and FEL 3 for construction-level planning. Functional spec-ifications should be developed at these stages

• Design and development: When drawings are produced, graphics are developed, and technical packages are tested in the client’s application and facility. This is also the stage where functional specifications are tested against reality.

• Construction and commissioning: When all equipment is installed and wired, and receives final checkout before startup.

“Many companies skimp at the definition stage, but this is where they should spend, because that’s where it costs the least, and where it’s easiest to make changes that can have the greatest impact on the successful out-come of a project,” explained Batts. “However, as they progress to design/development and construction/com-missioning, the cost and complexity of changes goes up, and the chance that those changes can help goes down, especially when you get out into the field.”

Opportunity assessments Maverick’s tactical advice on seeking opportunities and including them at the project definition stage can be used equally well for alarm rationalization, HMI ef-fectiveness and improved cybersecurity, which is more

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effective if it can be “baked into” applications and net-works at the beginning, instead of being added later.

“As information technology (IT) and operations tech-nology (OT) converge, there’s a lot more connections and chances for data availability, but it’s crucial to have good definition and design for cybersecurity, with fire-walls and demilitarized zones (DMZ) that prevent vul-nerable pathways from the plant floor and control sys-tem to the business levels,” added Batts. “This can be done at the definition stage, and it’s especially impor-tant for chemical manufacturers that are protecting in-tellectual property as well as operations.”

Just as process engineers do risk assessments (RA)

for safety and cybersecurity projects, and determine possible points of failure or vulnerabilities, they can use the same mindset to look for opportunities for pos-itive gains in their applications and facilities, and add them to the definition and/or design stages. “While RAs seek possible failures or risks to budgets, oppor-tunity assessments (OA) can be done at each project stage, and it’s important to involve the whole team. If you can do an RA at the definition stage, you can maybe design out and mitigate problems at no cost that would be very expensive later. With an OA, you can possibly add a change early on for very little cost that can have a big financial benefit later.”

INSTANT ANALYTICS AID IN PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATIONRockwell Automation advances its scalable FactoryTalk Analytics offering, from Devices to Machines and beyond Jim Montague

Since the dawn of industry, end users and machine builders have thirsted for a better understand-ing of the real-time performance and health sta-

tus of their production assets. This week, that dream of real-time analytics and instant visibility moved a few steps closer to reality at the Information Solutions exhibit at the Automation Fair event in Houston, where Rockwell Auto-mation demonstrated three major advances in advanced analytics under the umbrella of its FactoryTalk software offering. These included two recently commercialized of-ferings, FactoryTalk Analyics for Devices and FactoryTalk Analytics for Machines, as well as Project Scio, a broader analytics effort currently under development.

Enabling machine-level analyticsFirst up, Le Roy Howe, commercial engineer, Infor-

mation Solutions, Rockwell Automation, showed how FactoryTalk Analytics for Machines could be wirelessly linked to a clean-in-place (CIP) skid from Central States Industrial using a Rockwell Automation Allen Bradley 9300-ENA cloud gateway. An add-on instruction down-loaded to the skid’s controller allowed the gateway to gather real-time data from the skid’s instruments and deliver it to the subscription-based analytics service on Microsoft Azure.

“This lets us generate reports, dashboards and other graphics related to machine performance for both ma-chine builders and end users,” Howe explained. “We can even rearrange and prioritize this information to show details that they want most, such as top five, top 10 or top 100 event history items,” reported Howe. “We can also show mean time out of state (MTOS), mean

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“Project Scio automatically mashes together and orchestrates the data to create uniform display grids and reports.” Rockwell Automation’s Rob Prashad demonstrated how the company is democratizing the creation of advanced analytics applications.

time in state (MTIS), mean time to repair (MTTR), and other key performance indicator (KPI) guidance based on data.” FactoryTalk Analytics for Machines also allows end users or machine builders to compare ma-chine performance among fleets of similar assets across global operations and organizations.

“In addition, our gateway is connecting directly from Ethernet on the plant floor to the Internet, which means no server or added personnel are needed to maintain it,” Howe said. “FactoryTalk Analytics for Machine is cloud-ready and plug-and-play. The result is business value that’s simple and repeatable.”

Comprehensive component health In a second in-booth demonstration, Rob Prashad, com-mercial engineer, Rockwell Automation, detailed the capabilities of FactoryTalk Analytics for Devices, which adds to the overall capabilities of FactoryTalk Analytics by examining and evaluating the health of individual automation system components. When plugged into an automation network, FactoryTalk Analytics for Devices automatically recognizes and inventories all connected devices on the network and creates dashboards for their monitoring and management.

He also showed how FactoryTalk Analytics coordi-nates with Rockwell Automation’s Project Scio initiative to organize and combine many disparate data sources to create “storyboards” that users can employ to optimize their operations.

“From the enterprise side, these sources can include

enterprise resource planning (ERP), FactoryTalk Histo-rian, SAP, RabbitMQ message-queueing software, big data or supporting web services. All of this and more can go into Project Scio, which automatically mashes together and orchestrates the data to create uniform dis-play grids and reports. All of these real-time analytics are scalable at the operations layer.”

Prashad added that when users log-in to Scio, they are first brought to a landing pages with their favorite reports and others shared among fellow users. This al-low all parties to view applicable KPIs, and produce new favorite reports based on the changing needs of their applications.

“For example, they can progress from energy consumed by a system over time to energy consumed per product produced.” Prashad explained. And perhaps most impor-tantly, any user can create the views they need—without having to be a data scientists or developer.

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Traditionally, electrical power distribution and automation control systems have been supplied as independent systems. This two-system ap-

proach introduces complexity and costs throughout the life of the plant.

“The electrical group and the controls group do sepa-rate engineering, designs, purchases and installations,” said Ted Mroz, EPC business manager, North America, Rockwell Automation. “Separate systems require multi-ple vendor relationships, producing duplicate visualiza-tion, archiving and reporting platforms.”

The two systems take separate plans for factory acceptance testing and commissioning, often on dif-ferent timelines. “By putting them together, you can use one supplier/vendor/partner to pre-assemble and prewire, and put it at the site,” Mroz said. “You don’t have to wait, then put it together and test it on-site, along with everything else that’s go-ing on in a construction environ-ment. That takes fewer hours, and shortens the schedule.”

Rockwell Automation’s relation-ships with multiple vendors allow us-

ers to choose electrical components best suited to their requirements, connected by unmodified Ethernet to ease integration. Typical savings from this “packaged systems” approach alone are in the range of 15%. The benefits of such an integrated approach to automation and electrifi-cation was among the innovations discussed at the Engi-neering, Procurement and Construction Industry Forum at this week’s Automation Fair event in Houston.

The power of digitalizationIn many cases, power system communication technolo-

ENGINEERING, PROCUREMENT AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY FORUM: SAVE ON PROJECTS WITH UNIFIED POWER AND AUTOMATION SYSTEMBy putting packaged systems together on unmodified Ethernet, the Integrated Power & Automation offering from Rockwell Auto-mation can register 90% savings on integration costsPaul Studebaker

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gies have not kept pace with automation systems. Plants often maintain substation automation systems with in-telligent electrical devices (IEDs) operating on a vari-ety of networks. The electrical supervisory control and data acquisition (eSCADA) system has limited visibility to the process control system.

For process control, some plants use proprietary net-works that rely on individual, hardwired connections for motor control devices. Others have adopted a second dig-ital network to ease motor control integration, but face configuration and response time challenges, and limited access to data. Still others have improved control system integration and communication with an Ethernet infra-structure, but no digital access to substation data.

“With a unified network and unified system, now you can connect your electrical components to the control system or DCS, reducing material and labor costs. By going from analog to digital, you have fewer cables and trays, saving materials and labor,” Mroz said.

Unified systems can improve workplace safety with re-mote monitoring, and reduce unplanned downtime with real-time access to operating conditions, faults, alarms and events. And the digital solution can save more than 25% in design and implementation costs.

Savings add upBy replacing independent eSCADA and process control systems with a unified, fully digital system based on un-modified Ethernet, Rockwell Automation’s Integrated Power & Automation offers 70% to 90% savings in inte-gration costs, Mroz said.

Using EtherNet/IP, Allen-Bradley Intelligent Motor Control devices communicate and work as an integral

part of the process control system. At the same time, critical substation equipment communicates with IEDs over Ethernet using the IEC-61850 standard.

Substation data maps directly to the control environ-ment for seamless communication between the IEDs and the control platform. The result is a digitally-en-abled, unified system that provides integrated substation visibility through the same system that runs the rest of the plant, offering:

• Less complexity and duplication with one net-work, visualization, archiving and reporting plat-form;

• Access to synchronized, time-stamped data from a single source;

• Better load management and energy manage-ment;

• Real-time monitoring of electrical and process systems from anywhere;

• Up to 90% lower integration costs as part of a Rockwell Automation Logix control system;

• Up to 70% lower integration costs when inte-grated as a power skid with third-party control platforms; and,

• Faster and easier system modification and ex-pansion.

“You have a simpler system, with better access to the equipment since you don’t need to add twisted pairs for every functionality,” said Mroz. The platform is ready to connect to the enterprise, IT and OT world. “You’ve put in the plumbing for optimization, maintenance, access to the equipment. All the data is available—it’s not another capital project down the road when you want more.”

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SAVE THE DATE! AUTOMATION FAIR RETURNS TO PHILADELPHIA IN 2018

We'll see you at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, November 14-15 for Automation Fair.