Peter Martin Whacks ‘Em Between the Eyes
Invensys’ vice president of performance management, Dr. Peter Martin, brought his crusade for higher visibility of automation in the enterprise to Foxboro User Group, which kicked off today in Boston.

He talked about the effect of activist boards of directors since Enron and the other CEO debacles, and how CEOs have less than a year in general to perform, or they are gone. “So,” he said, “what do you think these people want from you? They want you to show them that you are worth something. How can you prove to your executives that you are the most valued employees in your company? You need to realize your worth. You would be shocked at your worth.”

Bluntly, he went on, “Your worth is phenomenal. You provide more value than any other part of the organization. You must demonstrate your worth– your CFO isn’t up at night demonstrating your worth. If your CFO doesn’t know what your value is, your value is zero. And the response to zero value employees is rightsizing!”

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“What you must do is go beyond automation to real business problems that you can solve with automation techniques. Success is when the top executives in your company use your solutions daily, and they know the data came from you.” Invensys’ vice president of performance management, Dr. Peter Martin, brought his crusade for higher visibility to the Foxboro Users Group Conference.

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Complete our survey to predict how engineers jobs will change in the next 10 to 20 years. See the results in the September issue of Control magazine.

Foxboro Comes Home to Boston
The 2007 Foxboro User Group meeting began Sunday night with a reception and exhibits. They called the exhibit area the Fast Lane Pavilion, and provided a number of Wii-based road-racing games. Attendees can win play money with the face of Terry Deo, user group chair, on the bills, and enter to take home the Wii games. In contrast with the larger Invensys Process Systems joint user-group meeting last year, this is an intimate, almost family gathering of 360 attendees. The reception included a stunning performance by a group of teen students from Franklin School for the Performing arts called Electric Youth. They played two sets of Broadway and pop tunes with singing and dancing by the 13 girls and 4 boys of the ensemble. Electric Youth performs the national anthem at Fenway Park on July 19th. This user group is different, as steering committee member Larry Wells, of Georgia Pacific, pointed out. “This is just us and Foxboro’s technical staff, with less marketing-oriented stuff.”

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Thad Lewis Frost, IA marketing manager, went over the I/A roadmap with Foxboro Users Group attendees, concentrating on short-term deliverables, and pointing out the long-term direction.

Stress waves ID faults before they derail production
“Machine failure,” says Marc Hunter, of Invensys global alliance marketing, “is a process, not an event.” He described the process using the unfolding of a car wreck event as an analogy. Traditional vibration monitoring devices, he said, start picking up problems at the grinding and gnashing stage, just before the wreck occurs. Stress wave analysis, on the other hand, can pick up problems far earlier in the failure cycle.

Invensys has partnered with SwanTech, a Curtiss-Wright company, to private label SwanTech’s patented stress wave analysis devices and systems and bring them into the company’s I/A and InFusion framework.

Stress wave analysis uses a passive piezoelectric sonar sensor to monitor ultrasonic energy emitted from rotating machinery. “It is the stethoscope,” Hunter said, “capable of ‘hearing’ friction when it first starts.” Up to eight sensors connect to a SwanGuard device, which does data reduction and sends the data, either wirelessly or over Ethernet or other connection to a SwanServer, a Linux-enabled webserver that does final data analysis and provides a bidirectional link, via OPC, to an I/A or InFusion system.

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Enmeshed in the mesh for best practices
Sometimes a network does more than just communicate. Sometimes a network is so far-reaching and profound that it improves entire applications and their organization’s performance. Such is the case with Invensys Process Systems (IPS) and Foxboro Automation’s Mesh Network and its many related components. In their “Move and Groove to the Mesh—Upgrade Planning and Best Practices” presentation July 16 at the 2007 User Group Conference in Boston, Foxboro’s experts and several end users showed how the Mesh Network functions, how to plan for it, and how it was added to two major applications.

The users included Jack Easley, primary I/A administrator and control system cyber security team member at TXU Power’s Martin Lake Steam Electric Station, Stan Hobbs, Foxboro’s technical support specialist, Orren Siders, I&C team leader at Southern Co. and Georgia Power’s Plant Branch facility. Foxboro’s presenters included Stan Hobbs, technical support specialist, Gayle Hicks, advantage and lifecycle management director for all product lines and brands, and Jack Golding, regional customer service manager.

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Jack Easley, primary I/A administrator and control system cyber security team member at TXU Power’s Martin Lake Steam Electric Station, says TXU put many of Foxboro’s methods in place when it upgraded from a 36-station, legacy Nodebus system to a new Mesh Network solution with DCP270s and P92s.

Practical fieldbus tools aid predictive maintenance
Invest now, save later—if, that is, you use the right tools. Though fieldbus instruments and wiring aren’t always less expensive than traditional components, supporters say the true value of fieldbus technologies lies in improving maintenance staff productivity and in adopting predictive maintenance practices to increase uptime.

In his “Digital Fieldbus Solutions” presentation earlier today at Foxboro’s 2007 User Group Conference, Charlie Piper explored how field instruments have gone digital, traced the history of Foundation fieldbus, and showed how users can implement device type manager (DTM) and enhanced device description language (EDDL) tools to gain double-digit percentage savings. Piper is product manager on the development teams bringing new InFusion and I/A Series solutions for Foundation fieldbus to market.

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Charlie Piper, Invensys Process Systems Fieldbus Project Manager, explored how field instruments have gone digital and showed how users can implement DTM and EDDL tools to gain double-digit percentage savings.