Emerson and Meridium Marry Asset Management Expertise

You'd think that with 325 workshops and short courses, plus management sessions, industry forums, product roadmap presentations and networking opportunities, there'd be enough going on to keep everyone busy at the 2009 Emerson Global User Exchange this week in Orlando, Fla. But just to add to the festivities, Emerson also announced a marriage: Emerson Process Management and Meridium, a global leader in asset performance management solutions for the process, power, mining and discrete manufacturing industries, announced a partnership to deliver enhanced asset management capability to their customers in the process industries. By combining the power of Emerson's PlantWeb predictive intelligence with Meridium's advanced analytics and decision-support technology, customers now can manage and maintain their most critical production assets more effectively.

The child of this union is the new AMS Suite: Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium. The new product provides real-time connection to other AMS Suite applications to enable analysis of diagnostic alerts and other asset health information. Built on Meridium's Asset Performance Management (APM) Framework, the AMS Asset Portal 4.0 includes available options based on select Meridium application modules. These options extend advanced analysis and reporting of key performance indicators, management of data collected using handheld devices and integration with computerized maintenance management systems, such as SAP PM and IBM Maximo.

AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium delivers real-time information from users' online and offline assets to enable analysis of diagnostic alerts and other asset health information. Users can create key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure, track and evaluate overall asset performance and maintenance effectiveness. With these powerful metrics, users have clear visibility to poor performing assets and production strategies, allowing them to implement and monitor process changes to improve performance and profitability.

AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium marries data from the real-time and fixed asset worlds and closes the loop on work order management from smart instrumentation through fixed assets, all the way to the enterprise."AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium is an extension of our existing product," explains Craig Llewellyn, president of Emerson's asset optimization business. "What we've done is create connectors that hook into the AMS Suite product part of PlantWeb and provide an extraction of the data and real-time diagnostics to be incorporated into the Meridium database and framework. It can put fixed assets and smart assets around the plant into a single database and use their entire suite of analysis tools to determine the total performance of that plant.

"Also, by connecting to Meridium, we now have a robust connection to SAP and IBM enterprise-type solutions so we can close the entire loop on work order management from smart instrumentation through fixed assets, all the way to the enterprise."

The marriage of PlantWeb asset-management capabilities and Meridium's analytical tools has been one encouraged by customers, says Bonz Hart, president of Meridium.

"Our clients have been asking us to provide a platform where they can develop overall asset strategies that access their smart systems and can grow and learn over time, and this connection with Emerson allows us to do that in a way that we believe is a step-change for the industry. With wireless connectivity, we will see the amount of data explode over the next few years, and this allows you to use that data to a business advantage in a competitive way."

This marriage of the real-time world with the fixed asset world is a departure from the current situation where plants have had to deal with two separate databases—one for fixed assets and one for real-time monitoring—and make any connections between the two manually. "The beauty of this solution, says Llewellyn, "is that we've been able to marry these two environments and provide a platform to provide decision support across the entire enterprise."

AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium is being demonstrated at the 2009 Emerson Global User Exchange and is available for purchase now. For more on AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium, go to www.assetweb.com. To hear a podcast featuring Craig Llewellyn and Bonz Hart explaining more about AMS Asset Portal 4.0 powered by Meridium, go to www.controlglobal.com/multimedia/2009/AssetManagement0909.html.