Transcript
I just got to spend three days in my old stomping grounds of Houston, Texas. I lived there until less than two years ago but it was sure nice to be back in what is the biggest small town in America. I really miss it, but so nice to see some familiar faces, and I’ll be back again soon. Covering this industry, I’m bound to be.
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I was there like a lot of people for Yokogawa’s YNOW users’ conference. They have quite a crowd this year as it was their first YNOW in North America since 2018. It didn’t disappoint. I learn a lot and it was hard to narrow down some of the key takeaways for our discussion today. But never fear, I did come away with five key points that were made throughout the conference, meaning these topics found their way into several sessions so you can ascertain they’re pretty important trends on the tops of people’s minds these days.
I’m going to use the help of some of my colleagues at Control who were also on hand, so I’ll borrow a bit from their reporting as well. And, if you were there, I’d love to hear your opinions. Feel free to shoot me an email. My email is simple, it’s just [email protected]. Or, connect with me on LinkedIn.
So, what do we find in Houston?
1. Industrial autonomy. If there was any one overarching topic, it was the transition from industrial automation to industrial autonomy, or as Yokogawa likes to say, IA2IA.
Yokogawa’s president and CEO for North America, Kevin McMillen, set the tone in this regard when he said, AI impacts every part of our business. We can either be run over by it or face the change and use it. It’s hard to disagree, and you’d been hard-pressed to find many at the conference who would.
We saw a long lineup of speakers hammer that point home:
Peter Kwaspen of Shell Global Solutions International, said in a keynote address that industrial autonomy is not only inevitable, but also needed.
ARC Advisory Group’s Mark Gupta, proclaimed on a panel “The next frontier is to leverage information to make it more autonomous.”
And, my colleague Keith Larson has a great interview you can find on ControlGlobal.com with Yokogawa’s systems leader Mitsuhiro Yamamoto where they talked about everything from the DCS business to artificial intelligence, industrial autonomy and, leading into our second takeaway, the impact of the Open Process Automation movement on the industry’s future.
2. Open process automation. If you’re not aware, Yokogawa is the systems integrator for the OPA project started by ExxonMobil but now, including several companies, and a testbed plant in Louisiana.
I got a chance to listen to David DeBari, technical team leader for ExxonMobil’s Open Process Automation (OPA) program, talk about the testbed plant. It's a big step in the progression of OPA, which has had its industry doubters over the years.
The quest for open process automation still has a lot of development ahead, particularly as DeBari and his colleagues seek more collaboration with other end users and suppliers to further transition industry from closed and proprietary automation to an open and secure, standards-based system that promotes innovation and value creation.
It wasn’t the only place people were talking about open process automation. Kelly Li, commercial lead for Open Process Automation at ExxonMobil, said in the women in engineering panel, as reported by my colleague at Control Jim Montague, that working with OPA technologies is transformative because it provides an open control architecture that challenges many old ways.
3. Another partner in OPA is Petronas, and Sharul Rashid said OPA is an example of our third trend, “coopetition” or collaboration. It’s no secret collaboration between users and suppliers has long been discussed and that needs to grow even stronger in this age of digital transformation. We need interoperability to be at the top of minds these days and, well, things just need to be easier to set up and use as one generation of plant operators gives way to a new one.
Another aspect is partnering with other industries. Being in Space City it was a natural fit to discuss how process control and space tech have quite a synergy and can lean and learn on each other. There was a wonderful panel discussion on this that I sat in on and wrote about. I also will have more on this in my November column in Control magazine, if you are a subscriber.
4. Safety, safety and safety. Oh, and how about safety. Safety shows up in many forms, There’s systems safety, i.e. cyber security. But there’s also getting workers out of hazardous locations. Autonomy is obviously key here and it’s another reason our first trend is at the top.
5. Send in the robots! The rise of robotics is our final trend to discuss today. Yokogawa’s Penny Chen, the company’s global lead of its robotics task force, said she and her colleagues started investigating how robots could be used in the process industries about six years ago. Now, robots are benefiting from the emergence of wireless communications. The cloud is also making it easier for them to process and manage data. Plus, they’re more affordable and easier to use, Chen told the audience.
As I said in my opener, there’s so much to discuss that I can’t possible do it in our allotted time, so I am going to invite you all to check out all for the articles from the event on ControlGlobal.com. It’s really fascinating to see what is happening in the industry these days and what may happen in the future.
