"Since we're in Washington, DC," John Berra quipped, in his last official address as business leader of Emerson Process Management, "I thought I should give a state of the union address. We are stronger than we have ever been before. This is the last week of our Fiscal Year, and I can't reveal the whole year numbers, but for the first 3 quarters, our business was up 18% over last year. If the numbers stay on track, Berra intimated, Emerson may grow a little over a billion dollars in a single year.

Welcoming us to the 10th Annual Emerson Exchange was Greg Stephens, chairman of the Emerson Global Users Exchange, to give it its whole and rightful title. Stephens said that attendance would run over 2579 (might get as high as 2700) which is ten times the attendance (250) at the first Emerson Exchange in 1998.

He talked about this third year of the PlantWeb Feedback tool, and asked for more feedback, and he annouced that there would be a PlantWeb Excellence Award for the person "who squeezed the orange and got every drop out of it."

I have been hollering about this for several months now...I even wrote an editorial lamenting it, "The Elephant in the Room." What is "it"?

"It" is the fact that there is an incredible dearth of good engineering practice information for doing post-prototype wireless sensor and network implementations.

It's all well and good to say that you can walk around doing the Verizon "can you hear me now" walk with a transmitter until you find the perfect spot to put it, but that isn't going to work when...

New User Interface for PHD

“We have many thousands of our data historian, PHD, being used by hundreds of customers at thousands of sites,” said Honeywell Process Solutions’ vice president of strategy and global marketing Harsh Chitale. “So we are very exited to introduce a completely new visualization and analysis engine for PHD.”

Safety: Controller Integration with System Segregation“Honeywell works closely with its User Group, and the many Customer Advisory Boards set up globally. This has made it possible to provide the new solutions we are introducing at User Group this week,” said Harsh Chitale, vice president of strategy and global marketing for Honeywell Process Solutions, talking about R310, the latest rele...

HONEYWELL’S NEW ONEWIRELESS RELEASE IS ISA100-READY

OneWireless Extends the Process Control Network

Urso Magnifico, now reincarnated as Vice President for Technology, Jason Urso, displayed an entirely new alter ego, Super Urso, complete with cape and x-ray vision goggles, guided the Honeywell User Group 2008 crowd through a swooping and soaring vision of the technology roadmap Honeywell is following.

“The three pillars of the Honeywell vision are safety, reliability and efficiency. These are the pillars of operational excellence,” Urso said. “And the first of these is process safety.”

Honeyw...

14 advisory boards form the HPS CAB. Jason Bottjen of Valero gave a talk about this method of giving Honeywell input. Bottjen says that there are some overwhelmingly important reasons to participate in Voice of the Customer sessions:
--influence the HPS development roadmap

--extend life of your HPS investment

--optimize your migration planning

--learn how other companies solve similar problems

--peer networking

Now there's even a virtual CAB: www.letstalk processcontrol.com...

Tom Kindervater, co-chair of the User Input Subommittee, provided the description of how Honeywell's unique customer input system for enhancements works. The UIS develops a detailed "want" list and Honeywell does the development work under the direction of the UIS.

No other customer input body in the automation industry has this level of power and authority.

Kindervater went through the details of UIS R13 release and release R14.. Many are significant enhancements to Honeywell systems.

"How d...

According to David Wade, there are over 700 customers attending HUG this year, with over 120 first-timers....