Process Control Career -CONTROL MAG 04 2005

8/7/2019 Process Control Career -CONTROL MAG 04 2005

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If current trends continue, most of you will no longer beworking as a control engineer for an end user company 10years from now. More likely you will be working for a sys-tems integrator, a process control vendor, or a service com-pany of some kind. Soon, there may be nobody left in theplants, your accountant-bosses will have subcontracted allthe work out, and process control will have become anotherpurchased utility, like electricity and water.

Thats what happened to the engineering and technicalstaff who worked at the Danube Refinery, Szzhalombatta,Hungary. The refinery is the biggest production facility of the MOL Group, a huge oil conglomerate in Europe. Eightyears ago, 130 engineers and technicians worked in therefinery. Today, after downsizing, outsourcing and restruc-turing, all of them are gone.

As the former instrumentation department disappeared,most of its services were taken over by vendors likeHoneywell, says an MOL manager, who asked to remainanonymous. Another 45 employees were eliminated whenthe refinery contracted out operation of its wastewater andwaste incineration facilities to EarthTech in the UK.

The refinery also gave Emerson $10 million to design andinstall a new control system as the main automation con-tractor (MAC) for a control project. As the MAC, Emersonwill perform front-end engineering design, applicationsengineering and project management, install and commis-sion the automation solution, and supply operator training.

That doesnt leave much work for the refinerys controlpeople. The company tries to hire back or subcontract for-mer MOL employees when it needs specific knowledge,says the anonymous manager.

This is happening at smaller companies, too. Our chief instrument engineer left for greener pastures, and wasnever replaced, laments a manager of a small, specialtyorganic chemical manufacturer in the Midwest. Thenanother instrument specialist left. Now we are relying onan engineering service to support our PLC programming,HMI programming and instrument specifications, andrelying on process engineers to tune controllers. The few

remaining instrument technicians we have do not have

the time to tune controllers since there are too many otherfires to put out.

The power industry is an excellent example of what hap-pens when knowledge leaves. As we point out in this monthsControl Report (p31), no coal-fired power plants have beenbuilt in 25 years, all the people who knew how to controlcoal-related process have retired, and there is no oneleftexcept a few vendorswho know how to control a coal-fired power plant. Many in the process industries are goingdown that road, too, as knowledge leaves the plants.

One reason for loss of institutional knowledge is the agingand shrinking workforce in our business (Figure 1). A CON-TROL reader poll shows that 71% of you are 4150 yearsold, and 12% of you are over 50. Only 3% of you are under25 and ready to step into their shoes and learn the business.Few young engineers choose to enter our profession, maybebecause their fathers warn them away. Or maybe youngengineers avoid control because of the disturbing trend of process companies to contract out major parts of a controlengineers work and shut down entire instrumentationdepartments, as MOL did.

A Boon to SuppliersTheres no question that the loss of knowledge in plants isbenefiting suppliers, such as process control vendors, sys-tems integrators and service companies. We are seeing avery large upswing in engineering services, says Bill

Robertson, director of global services and support for processsystems and solutions division of Emerson ProcessManagement (www.emersonprocess.com). Customers areincreasingly outsourcing engineering services on new proj-ects, migrations and, to some degree, ongoing system main-tenance and operations.

Honeywell says it takes deep pockets for a process compa-ny to keep up these days. Unless a plant has the luxury of being able to overstaff and over-train, they will have toaddress the issue through the strategic use of suppliers whocombine expert knowledge with technology that allows thatknowledge to be disseminated out over a broad customer

set, says Andy Drexler, Global Marketing Leader, Services,

w w w. c o n t r o l g l o b a l . c o m A P R I L / 2 0 0 5 37

Layoffs, cutbacks, outsourcing, retirements, forced retirements, merg-

ers and consolidations are stripping plants of instrument engineers,

control engineers, technicians, maintenance people and operators. Oncegone, their accumulated knowledge of the plants processes goes with

them, leaving companies without in-house expertise. Companies are

turning to vendors for help.


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Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywell.com).Drexler, of course, means companies like Honeywell.

To prevent the impact of lost expertise, plants must care-

fully select partners whose expertise they can use on an asneeded basis and who offer the technology to help less expe-rienced workers quickly reach a level of proficiency thatonce required years of experience, he adds.

All the big process control companies are aware of the out-sourcing trend, and are gearing up to provide services rang-ing from design to installation to operations to maintenance.John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management,agrees that Emerson is capable of doing everything in aplant, including running it. We have no plans to offer sucha service, says Berra, and I doubt that any company wouldwant us to actually run their plant.

Nevertheless, the vendors are developing new hardwareand software that gives them the capability to take over moreand more responsibilities, such as automated monitoring,documentation, tuning, diagnostics and so on.

Advanced diagnostic capabilities, such as our LoopScout /Alarm Scout Service, enable the Experion controlsystem to quickly identify and isolate problem areas in thelarge sea of control loop and alarm performance data, saysDrexler. These services automate and optimize plant workprocess that would have required significant time and effortfrom expert personnel in the past.

Emerson just announced its CSI 9210 machinery healthtransmitter (Figure 2), which automates rotating machine diag-

nostics. The system predicts when a motor-pump set needsmaintenance. Analysts who know how to interpret vibrationdata are leaving the plants, says Brian Humes, VP of Emerson.

He says they are retiring or forming their own engineering com-panies, and the plants are not hiring anyone to take over thejobs. Their knowledge is not being passed on. The CSI 9210performs the necessary analysis and identifies the problem, somaintenance can take care of it without an analyst.

Unintended ConsequencesNo one can blame vendors for taking advantage of the oppor-tunity. Plants are losing or divesting their control systems pro-fessionals for various reasons, some good, some bad.Sometimes the motivation is a clear attempt to shake up andmodernize plant and organizational systems that are stuck inthe mud. Sometimes the motivation is clearly to appease WallStreet analysts. Sometimes, the motivation is just plainly to pro-vide more income for the top management of the company.Companies do what their management believes they have todo. And so we meet the law of unintended consequences.

In many cases, plants that divest themselves of engineershave nowhere else to turn for help but to their vendors. Thevendors have the necessary expertise, experience, processknowledge and a staff of engineers. However, rumors persistthat the vendors are stretched very thin these days, and arenot keeping up.

Glenn Givens, a control systems specialist at Inno-vention Industries (www.innovin.com) in Burlington,

E x p e r t i s e L os t

38 A P R I L / 2 0 0 5 w w w. c o n t r o l g l o b a l . c o m

20-25 60+

41-5031-40

26-3051-60

11-20

5-10

21-30Less

than 5

30+

W hat Is the Av e ra ge Age of Pe ople W h o Work i n Au t omat ion at Your Pl ant ?

W hat 's the Av e ra ge Len g th of Time (I n Y ea rs )Pe ople at Your Pl ant Ha v e Worked in Au tomat ion ?

The aging, shrinking population of control engineers is not being replaced by younger engineers.

Source: CONTROL Magazine reader poll, www.controlglobal.com.

Figure 1: Aging, Shrinking Workforce


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controls and, occasionally, train techni-cians, he says. We have detailed recordsof every single bump test done to every sin-

gle loop since the day we went into busi-ness. I can find the data files for every oneand tell you how I calculated the tuningparameters, how I determined how muchbacklash/stiction was present, and so on.

A great deal of new software is available tohelp you document your system. Wonderwares Industrial Application Server,for example, allows control and system engi-neers to standardize system implementationand encapsulate knowledge on ArchestrA-based systems, says Steve Lewarne, Wonderwares vice president of productmarketing. ArchestrA provides a structuredmodel and approach to designing superviso-

ry automation and information systems, heexplains. ArchestrA is also self-document-ing with respect to initial configuration andmodifications made throughout the lifecycle of the system. These allow system engi-neers to easily design, build, deploy, andmaintain secure and sustainable automa-tion and information applications.

Yokogawa has something similar.Yokogawa has developed a software solu-tion called Exapilot (Figure 3) for cap-turing this fleeting best-operations knowl-

edge, says Fred Woolfrey, Productivity

Solutions Consultant at Yokogawa(www.us.yokogawa.com). Exapilot is aMicrosoft Windows-based operation effi-

ciency improvement software packagethat allows operating personnel to stan-dardize and automate what would nor-mally be manual procedures and incor-porate the know-how and skill of expert

operators. Operating personnelcan build and modify these pro-cedures with an icon basedinterface. Users can easily con-figure and test complex proce-dures. Procedures built withExapilot can be used to stan-dardize and automate manualprocedures, improve plant effi-ciency, and improve the safety of plant operations.

Because vendors must docu-ment what they do when devel-oping and configuring controlsystems so they can support themlater, theyve developed suchtools for their own use. Checkwith your control system vendorto see whats available.

Train and Keep Maintenance An I/E Supervisor at a power company inTexas trains his technicians and spreadsthe knowledge around, so hes not crip-pled if a key person leaves. Hes also lessdependent upon vendors. When we pur-chase an upgrade or a new system, we addin cost for training in the price of theequipment, he explains. If it is not costeffective to send all the techs, then the

ones that do attend the training arerequired to train the rest of the group. Ialso rotate areas of responsibilities withthe techs to keep them current in theunderstanding, troubleshooting andrepair of the equipment. This helps theseindividuals become more of an asset to thecompany and it makes my life a whole loteasier. You can never train enough.

He loves the new open control sys-tems, because it gets him away from pro-prietary hardware. Control system man-

ufacturers used to build and supply every

Figure 3.

Capture That Knowledge

Yokogawas Exapilot allows operating personnel to

standardize and automate what would normally be

manual procedures, incorporate the know-how and

skill of expert operators, and document everything.

S O U R C E :

Y O K O G A W A


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component, but now they buy from thirdparties to build their systems, he says.Believe it or not, this is really a cost sav-

ings to the customer. For example, if Ilose a hard drive on my engineers con-sole, I run down to Radio Shack and buyone at a quarter of the cost than whenyou had to buy from a single source.

Its not just economics. He says thevendors have lost some of their expertisein repairing their own equipment. All thevendors responding to my question of how much they support their olderequipment said they go back to the dawnof time, but thats what you would expectthem to say. They did not say they hadexperts doing the work.

Therefore, you can probably build a caseagainst letting a vendor take over mainte-nance on your system on the basis of costand performance. Cruising the automationlists on the Web would probably get youenough anecdotal evidence to even make aflint-nosed bean counter think twice aboutoutsourcing maintenance. Keeping equip-ment knowledge in-house helps keep jobsfor you and your techs, but you also have tobe cost effective.

Analyze Those Loops Yourself The process control vendors and servicecompanies have built powerful analysisand diagnostic capabilities into their newsoftware systems. They have the ability tomonitor every process variable, put allthe data into a process historian, and ana-lyze it on a loop-by-loop basis for effi-ciency from remote service centers or

locally, in your plant. You might want to take advantage of thesame tools to preserve your job. PlantTriagefrom ExperTune and similar software fromother vendors can perform the same servicethat the process control companies offer. Infact, the vendors might be using the samesoftware, because it works.

A performance monitoring packagelike PlantTriage prioritizes the loops thatneed attention and automatically diag-noses the problems, says John Gerry,

president of ExperTune (www.exper-

tune.com). The only way to survive andbe competitive is to use software tools likethis. It also helps you preserve process

knowledge, because it records all PID tun-ing changes and allows you to enter notesas to why you tuned it that way, he adds.

Run Your Own Server Farm With server-based systems soon to beannounced, the big control vendors willbe able to run your plant from centralizedserver farms, where specialists of allkinds will be available to diagnose prob-lems, retune loops, decide when mainte-nance needs to be done, and even operatethe plant from afar. In other words, theentire control system and all its engineer-ing and tech support can be outsourced.

There is no reason why a forward-think-ing control engineer such as yourself could not set up a similar server farm inyour company; that is, a centralized systemthat monitors and controls all your compa-nys process operations around the world.In other words, instead of having instru-mentation departments in each plant, setup a central Instrument Engineeringdepartment at company headquarters, andrun all your plants from there.

Such a system documents and pre-serves all the process knowledge in oneplace. A centralized system also preservesthe jobs of your companys expert controlengineers, techs, and operations people,and keeps all their knowledge in house.

The wave of the future is to consolidate allthe control, maintenance and diagnosticswork in a plant anyway, so just ride the wave,

set up your own central operation, and keepyour knowledge in house. Otherwise, youmight do better to shop your resume to who-ever will have to pick up the ball as theknowledge disappears from your plant.

Adversity always breeds opportunity. When your business accounting manage-ment starts looking for ways to replaceengineers and techs with outside services,show them that you can do the same jobat a lower cost by using the same knowl-edge management tools that the outside

suppliers will use if you dont. C

Process Control Career -CONTROL MAG 04 2005

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