Capitalize on Crisis! - Review of Yokogawa 2009 User Group Meeting

 

By Bill Lydon - Contributing Editor

 

The Yokogawa User Group Conference had an enthusiastic group of automation professionals in attendance. In his opening remarks, Con Lau, GM Marketing of Yokogawa of America, discussed the Asian representation of crisis that is made up of two letters - danger and opportunity. “Where there is danger, there is opportunity.” People attending were looking for opportunities to improve operations and efficiency.

 

Lau commented that American surfers have a similar view of life. As a surfer, you can get “pounded” by the waves and die, or you can ride the wave. “Today we are getting waves and waves of bad news, but let’s ride the waves and make something positive…" Lau’s point is that by using our creativity, good things will happen.

 

Lau indicated that six months ago they considered replacing this conference with a digital web conference because of the economic crisis. Yokogawa sent out a survey to about 7,000 users and it was clear that people believe it is more valuable to learn and network face to face. Doing the conference over the WEB would be like a “telephone birthday party,” Lau commented.  (Editor's note: I agree there is a great deal of value for people to attend these events and the knowledge gained will yield benefits for companies that far outweigh the investment.)

 

The theme this year is Sustainability, maintaining excellence in up and down business cycles. In down cycles, particularly focusing on improving operations and lowering costs, including energy costs.

 

 

Dave Johnson, President and CEO Yokogawa Corporation of America, provided a business update. David punctuated Yokogawa’s commitment to be a good corporate citizen and have “courage to innovate.”

 

Since Yokogawa made a commitment and organizational changes to increase its worldwide sales, the growth has been 25-30% per year with about 75% of sales outside of Japan. As of March 31, 2008, Yokogawa had sales of $4.4 billion U.S. and a significant 9.3% of sales is invested in research and development. Yokogawa’s corporate R&D continues to include a research function for technologies to meet anticipated needs in 10 to 20 years.

 

In a very difficult period from April, 2008 to March, 2009 orders grew significantly. Systems & Engineering has grown to 50% of total sales and Johnson pointed out that Yokogawa has gained the confidence of users to warrant this business. In 2008, Yokogawa past a milestone with over 20,000 systems installed. Yokogawa’s DCS systems are backward compatible to their first DCS in 1975.  Johnson commented, “This has given us many opportunities.”

 

Johnson also mentioned that there is serious thinking about moving headquarters from Atlanta to Houston.

 

With all the discussion about green and sustainability, Johnson observed that, out of necessity, Yokogawa has been focused on this for years for one simple reason, “Japan has no natural resources.”

 

The Vigilant Plant Van (VP Van) has been very successful allowing people around the country to learn about new solutions and products to solve problems. The VP Van has been on tour for 6 months, with 92 events, and 30,857 miles driven.

 

David closed with Yokogawa’s commitment to provide customer concentric solutions based on leading edge technology.

 

 

Terry Jones gave a stimulating and thought provoking presentation. Terry is the founder and former CEO of Travelocity.com and CIO of Sabre, Inc.  Jones is now devoting much of his time to speaking and sharing his unique insights on the future of business through his consulting firm, Essential Ideas. www.essentialideas.com  

 

Jones, who took an idea and created a business that now has over 40 million members and over $5 Billion in travel bookings, shared first-hand knowledge of creating a national brand, thriving in rapidly changing markets and using technology for competitive advantage.

 

Jones drew a parallel between his early projects of putting technology on the “front end” of old systems and process engineers implementing new technology to run old plants. 

 

Jones talked about the "Dopeler Effect," the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. 

 

Innovation just isn’t about the idea. Jones described factors important for successful innovation as being willingness to keep trying, learning from mistakes, measuring, good team, funding, and protection from political sabotage.

 

Jone cited a Harvard business review article that stated, “somewhere out there is a bullet with your name on it. Shot by a competitor, unknown and unborn, who will render your business obsolete.” He restated it, “somewhere out there is a bullet with your name on it. Shot by a competitor, unknown and unborn, who will render your business model obsolete.”

 

Jones noted that good ideas usually come from the bottom, but the ideas need to get through the "Bozone Layer," that stops bright ideas from moving upwards in an organization. These are layers of middle management that resist change.

 

Efficient teams are a balance of experienced people with “old world” knowledge and new people with youthful exuberance. The old dogs will learn new tricks and new dogs will learn old tricks to create successful innovations.

 

 

 

Mark Peters, Vice President of Gulf Publishing, presented his 2009 Energy Outlook that was informative and thought provoking. Mark discussed the oil price impact on the refining industry. Oil prices have been on a roller coaster ride with a high of $145 in July 2008. A lot of the price increase was due to the decline of the dollar and speculation in the futures market. The drop in prices resulted in projects being put on hold. The lowering demand for commodities has resulted in lower prices of steel and concrete, which will improve project economics.

 

Mark observed that during the conference oil broke $60 per barrel, the second time in a week, “looking like it is testing a new bottom. The oil companies would like to see oil between $70-$80 per barrel to give them a better plan…” Three months ago, oil producers put together a consensus forecast of $88 per barrel average price for the year which means oil would need to go above $88 to make the average for the year.

 

Mark commented on the short term overcapacity but indicated that world demand growth will put pressure on prices as China and India develop a middle class. In addition, Europe is becoming increasingly dependant on Russia for energy.

 

Climate change legislation is a “known, unknown." We don’t know how it will be handled yet. Diesel is becoming a more important part of the fuel mix with use growing particularly overseas in the EU countries as they develop clean diesel engines. Most of the other parts of the world are migrating to diesel vehicles.

 

Mark concluded by discussing the 2007 EISA (Energy Independence Security Act) Renewable Fuel Standard government policies, requiring 14 billion gallons of corn ethanol and 22 billion gallons cellulosic biofuel production by 2022. Mark pointed out, “There is no successful process for cellulosic biofuel volume production at this point.” President Obama wants this signed into law by September when he goes to the UN Climate Change Treaty discussions to show that the United States is a leader. Mark observed, “Presidents love doing things like this because it is 10 years after they are out of office.” He stated there is a long history of presidents and politicians, from all political parties, doing this type of thing where impossible commitments are made for a date in the future after they are out of office.

 

"When you look at the energy industry, its going to be tough over the next 2-3 years, the turn will come because demand will continue to increase…”

 

 

Bruce Jensen, Manager of Systems Marketing & Solutions Support, gave the recognition award for the best contribution to Yokogawa's product development to Bill Reynolds, formerly of Murphy Oil for Trend Package improvements implemented in Yokogawa’s R4.01 release. Awards are given to an individual or company for suggesting a product improvement that was later implemented by Yokogawa. The criteria for the award requires suggestions from the User Group Issues List that are not fixes. The conference again featured a user-only session to discuss problems, issues, and ideas for improvement.

 

 

Bruce Jensen presented Yokogawa’s vision, direction, & roadmap.

 

Bruce started with the Centrum VP continuing focus on operational excellence with unified HMI, single real-time database, and the development of Real-time Production Organizer software. Real-time Production Organizer software is a suite of applications to bridge the gap between production planning and process control with the goal of delivering an integrated business to process production environment.  The company also continues to work with open standards including FDT, EDDL, and HART7.

 

Emphasis is being given to improve upstream oil and gas and electrical utility applications, including SIS-SCADA integration and new SCADA developments.

 

 

Yokogawa demonstrated the Real-time Production Organizer (RPO) PRO, a suite of manufacturing execution system (MES) software packages that integrate the production execution workflow across departments and provide information for decision makers. PRO is based on the ISA-95 model and performs the definition, dispatch, execution, analysis, and tracking functions.

 

RPO consists of five platform packages. Each package supports a Web service, making RPO ready for service oriented architectures (SOA). Users can adopt these packages in stages. The packages are:

 

 

Yokogawa expanded the STARDOM product line with the low power FCN-RTU that has an average power consumption of under 2 watts, wide temperature specification of -40 to 70 degrees C, and has three expansion slots. The unit features a low power 256MHz CPU 64MB SDRAM, 1MB SRAM, Flash Memory 64MB on board Ethernet 10M/100M with 3 RS-232 Ports, 12 analog inputs, 2 analog outputs, 16 digital inputs, and 8 digital outputs built-in. Programming is accomplished using the IEC61131-3 standard.  More Information

 

 

Omega Simulation demonstrated the OmegaLand simulator and VisualModeler products that can be used for design and training with Yokogawa’s DCS.  Operators receive realistic training in a virtual environment.  Visual Modeler is a process simulator that is designed for chemical, petrochemical, refining, and other applications.  Plant models can be configured by placing processing units such as distillation towers, reactors, heat exchangers, valves, and pumps as well as instruments such as flow meters, thermometers, and PID controllers on a process flow diagram (PFD). Piping for material flows and lines for transmitting signals can also be represented, connecting these units and instruments.  Visual Modeler can show valves, measurement instruments, and controllers as well as an equipment line for operation startup, backup devices in a standalone or a line configuration, and safety equipment. With the resulting plant level model, dynamic and steady state simulations can be carried out.

 

Omega Simulation Co., Ltd. Is 80% owned by Yokogawa. More Information

 

 

Gary Youell, Principle Technical Advisor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, described the need for a wireless network that is significantly more secure than SP100 and other industrial wireless networks for nuclear applications. Gary gave a good engineering and project description of the goals and challenges. The project is the Department Of Energy Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility which will extract nuclear materials from weapons and put the materials to use in commercial power applications. The challenges include having 9,000 sensors in a radio active work cells that are about the size of a machining center in a manufacturing plant in sealed box. Wiring penetrations cost $5,000 - $10,000 per connection and wiring is $1,000 per foot. They have not been able to find a wireless solution that has the data reliability and security to meet DOD requirements. The hope is to work with industry to have an open specification that meets these needs.

 

They have done some testing using the Emerson Starter Kit (900MHZ), Honeywell Starter Kit (2.4ghz), and Texas Instrument Development Kit (2.4ghz) that cost $20. They all performed well from a communications standpoint. Gary suggested the price differentials are something to ponder.

 

Gary is involved in the SRNL Wireless Radio Development Initiative for Industrial Homeland Security DOE Protection Of Classified Systems and intends to work with SP 100.

 

Gary is looking for answers to the data reliability and security to meet DOD requirements. More Information

 

 

 

Matrox Graphics demonstrated the Extio F1400™ remote graphics unit (RGU) that supports up to four digital or analog monitors at resolutions of up to 1920x1200 per display, or up to 2 dual-link digital monitors at the native resolution of 2560x1600. Extio RGUs feature passive (fanless) cooling and are compatible with the PCI, PCI-X or PCIe slots in the host system.

 

Matrox Graphics also showed M-Series multi-monitor graphics cards. These cards occupy a single PC slot to provide independent or stretched mode on up to four monitors simultaneously. www.matrox.com

 

 

Control Station announced completion of a cooperative reseller agreement with Yokogawa Corporation of America and general availability of its csTUNER PID tuning application that integrates seamlessly with the Yokogawa’s CS3000 distributed control system (DCS). csTUNER is based on Control Station’s LOOP-PRO Product Suite. The strength of LOOP-PRO is its ease-of-use and the application of Control Station’s patent-pending Non-Steady State (NSS) Modeling Innovation. The innovation enables end-users to accurately model both transient and noisy process data, a significant economic benefit to manufacturers across the process industries. www.controlstation.com

 

 

Northwire has a clever line of multi-pair Foundation fieldbus M-EZ (Marshaling EZ) cables the contain up to 24 individually foil-shielded pairs to lower installed field installation time and cost. The cables have an extruded PVC binder over each pair, all contained within a single cable. DataCELL Foundation fieldbus M-EZ allows for fast, simple installation into marshaling cabinets and requires no shrink tubing. All DataCELL Foundation fieldbus cables are FF-844 certified by the Fieldbus Foundation. DataCELL Foundation fieldbus versions are ITC (instrument tray cable)/PLTC (power-limited tray cable) rated for exposed-run (ER) applications and pass the same crush and impact tests for metal-clad cable (under UL 1569). ITC-ER/PLTC-ER cable allows users to do without the conduit when the cable is installed in accordance with recent National Electrical Code (NEC) amendments. The line includes an arctic-rated ITC/PLTC-listed version with optional armor and a RoHS-compliant UL 1309 marine shipboard-listed cable with a cut- and abrasion-resistant TPE outer jacket; both are suitable for use to -60°C. CSA, ABCD armored cables are also offered.  http://www.northwire.com/directFFOver.php