Jim is a 38-year veteran in industrial automation with Emerson and leads Emerson's global social marketing practice. He is the chief blogger of Emerson Automation Experts. Jim received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas and an MBA at the University of New Orleans. He began his career as a systems engineer for Conoco's offshore oil & gas production operations, based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In a recent LinkedIn article, “Smart Plant and Automation Modernization,” Emerson’s Jonas Berge, ISA Fellow and digital transformation advisor, lays out what a modern smart plant automation ecosystem should include, from field sensors and valves to the distributed control system (DCS), safety instrumented system (SIS), and device management software.
A remote operations control center, or ROCC, is more than a room with remote consoles. Its value comes from giving operators and support teams a consistent way to monitor, control, and troubleshoot assets across sites. That consistency becomes especially important as fleets add solar, wind, hydro, battery storage, and conventional generation, often with different control platforms.
When a slurry valve fails in a remote part of a mine site, the cost goes well beyond the part: callouts, difficult access, personnel exposure, and lost production when a critical circuit goes down. Replacing a failed valve with the same type in the same conditions only repeats the cycle.
Bill Kleyman, CEO and Co-Founder of Apolo.us and Executive Chair of Data Center Programs for Informa, talked with Bob Yeager, President of Emerson’s Power and Water Solutions business, about what it actually takes to keep that power stable once a site goes live.
When QC scheduling is disconnected from production schedules, delays, inefficiencies, and coordination challenges can ripple throughout the facility. Real-time scheduling helps eliminate those gaps by synchronizing manufacturing and laboratory activities, so both teams work from the same, current, real-time-up-to-date information.
In an on-demand webinar, Emerson’s Irina Rumyantseva, AspenTech Senior Principal Solutions Consultant, and Salimzhan Kabylbayev, AspenTech Product Manager, show how the Aspen Plus® Process Simulation Software supports those decisions from property selection through conceptual screening, rigorous simulation, and hydraulics.
Meeting regulatory and industry standards drives more complex plants: advanced process licenses and catalysts, heat integration, power islanding, mixed energy sources including hydrogen readiness, carbon capture, closed-loop water, and pollution abatement. More process units mean more rotating and static equipment, which means more advanced process control and far more pervasive condition monitoring.
In a recent episode of The Main Column Podcast, Nithiya Parameswaran, Vice President of Product Management at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, joined Lee Nichols, Editor-in-Chief of Hydrocarbon Processing, to explain how Asset Performance Management (APM) is moving beyond monitoring toward predictive and prescriptive maintenance.
North American infrastructure was not built for the load growth now arriving from data centers, and the top industrial turbine manufacturers are booked solid for the next two to five years. That leaves operators one practical option: get more out of the plants they already own, many of them past the 40-year mark.
Every extra alarm competes for an operator’s attention, and a flooded list buries the one message that actually matters. Standards such as ANSI/ISA 18.2 and IEC 62682 give you a framework, but the day-to-day work happens in the point configuration inside Ovation Developer Studio.
A healthy alarm program in remote operations centers is core to asset performance and starts with a sound alarm philosophy and guidelines, not with the configuration screen.
Tech transfer remains one of the slowest, most frustrating bottlenecks in life sciences manufacturing, often stretching across half a decade or more. In a recent Qualitalks podcast episode, Qualistery Managing Director Yan Kugel spoke with Emerson VP of Marketing and Experience Nikki Bishop about why these projects stall and what actually helps close the gaps.
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