Emerson Process Management - Operational Benefits

Whether you call it SH&E, EH&S or HSE&E, it means one thing: No surprises.

Regardless of your profitability targets, the safety of your employees, surrounding community and the environment come first. When the materials you work with are inherently explosive, toxic or otherwise harmful and operating conditions add risks of temperature and pressure volatility,

safety is job one.

While you must be prepared to handle abnormal situations, wouldn’t you rather prevent them before they happen?

Imagine your process automation assets giving you the power to predict and prevent abnormal situations instead of simply reacting to them.

With PlantWeb, you can achieve an effective program for managing safety, health, and environmental risks and costs – one that goes beyond abnormal situation management to abnormal situation prevention.

Emerson has a broad range of superior measurement, control, and analytical technologies that help you run your operation smoothly, safely, and responsibly — including stack-gas analyzers and emissions-monitoring systems, as well safety-approved valves and transmitters. Now, with PlantWeb’s predictive intelligence and information integration, you can also...

Predict and prevent equipment failures that lead to process upsets
Improve operational procedures, and reduce risk to personnel
Streamline regulatory compliance
Use predictive intelligence to enable more automated safety loop testing

Predict and Prevent Equipment failures

Equipment damage most often occurs as a specific random event, not normal wear. Thus, preventable maintenance rarely helps. As a consequence, maintenance is either too late or too early. With PlantWeb’s predictive intelligence, you anticipate problems before they occur and take the right action, at the right time. You can prevent small problems from becoming big safety issues.

AMS Suite: Machinery Health Manager for motors, pumps, and other mechanical equipment alerts you to the early signs of problems – such as bearing wear – to help avoid failure.
Similarly, AMS Suite: Equipment Performance Monitor reports performance deviations in a wide range of process equipment, so you can have early detection of catastrophic failures of key pieces of equipment such as back pressure steam turbines.

Being able to predict the performance of instruments and valves is essential to plant safety. PlantWeb’s field instrumentation can help you there, too.

A Fisher FIELDVUE digital valve controller can diagnose and report not only its own health, but also that of the valve and actuator. It also offers automated partial-stroke testing to confirm operation of valves in safety-instrumented systems -- without requiring separate (and expensive) field-mounted test panels.

The QuickCheck capability of AMS Suite: Device Manager also simplifies interlock validation by enabling you to put several instruments in fixed checkout mode at the same time.

Improve operational procedures

With robust, reliable information available where it’s needed, PlantWeb helps you reduce the risk of problems introduced by human error.

Operators and other personnel gain confidence to respond correctly to timely, accurate information ... information that pinpoints precisely where a problem is ... with no time wasted. You gain the power to change work practices and procedures to gain efficiency and improve safety.

Besides the DeltaV system's intuitive access to control information, PlantWeb makes problem detection even easier by integrating many types of equipment information in a single browser-based Asset Portal.
When a problem arises, targeted PlantWeb Alerts help ensure that the right people get the right information right away -- including guidance on how to deal with the situation.
To help personnel gain hands-on experience dealing with abnormal situations before those situations occur, DeltaV Simulate enables operators and others to train with an exact copy of the automation system.

PlantWeb also helps improve maintenance safety. Many instrument and equipment problems can be diagnosed or even corrected remotely from the control room or maintenance shop, without sending technicians into hazardous areas.

Streamline regulatory compliance

Complying with environmental, safety, and other regulations is essential – and often expensive. The challenge is to find the most cost-effective ways to meet these important requirements.

By incorporating tighter control, you reduce fluctuations in your process which contribute to excursions and other compliance risks.

DeltaV Inspect [PDF] software monitors both device performance and overall loop performance. “Advisory alerts” notify of any degrading or abnormal condition. To learn more about how PlantWeb can help you achieve tighter variability visit the Quality page.

For most operations, regulatory compliance also means documenting engineering, operating, and maintenance activities. This is especially true for processes that face validation requirements like FDA 21CFR Part 11.

Automated tools for tracking and documenting changes can greatly reduce these costs – as long as all the needed information is readily available in a compatible digital form. PlantWeb makes the paperwork easier and less time-consuming by doing much of the work for you.

AMS Device Manager automatically documents all changes made through its workstation, including date, time, user, and as-found/as-left information. Available Audit Trail capabilities provide a valuable tool for documenting and reporting requirements.
The DeltaV and Ovation system's self-documenting engineering environment helps eliminate the need for separate offline or manual record-keeping, and its easy-to-use reporting tools let you easily generate reports to meet regulatory requirements.

Use predictive intelligence to enable more automated safety loop testing

Applying predictive diagnostics to the least used loops in a plant improves plant safety and availability. Extending the PlantWeb architecture, Emerson has introduced the world’s first smart SIS, integrating all three aspects of a Safety Instrumented System into one reliable, intelligent closed loop solution.

The Proof

For an in-depth discussion of how PlantWeb can help optimize Safety, Health and Environmental compliance, download the free white paper. Available in multiple languages!

Oil & Gas • Refining • Chemical • Pulp & Paper • Food & Beverage • Power • Pharmaceutical • Other Industries

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Last Updated 03/14/08