Emerson Exchange 365

A great company is a company that asks the right questions. Instead of, “What can we sell you?” or “What do you want to buy from us?” a great company asks its customers questions like, “What is your vision for the way your plant should operate?” or “How can we work together to solve your problems?”

This kind of collaborative approach to the customer relationship is the essential idea behind the strategic direction Emerson is taking, says Roel van Doren, President of Emerson Process Management, Europe, who kicked off the general session presentations on the opening morning of the 2014 Emerson Global Users Exchange in Stuttgart.

But before getting down to business, van Doren welcomed the more than 1,000 people who traveled from all over the world to attend the second Exchange held on European soil. He also thanked this year's participants for the hundreds of user abstracts that were submitted, approximately 100 of which will be featured during the three-day conference.

“For me personally, the Global Users Exchange is the highlight of the year,” van Doren remarked. “There is no single business meeting or event that surpasses this conference. It's a great opportunity to meet and talk with you, our customers, and get first hand input on what really matters to you. Interesting things happen when you bring together people with different perspectives. That's why the Exchange provides an unmatched opportunity to learn what others are doing, to get their insight on what's happening in the industry, and to leave with new ideas that you can put to work when you get home.”

With that, van Doren delved into the heart of the program—an overview of Emerson's strategic direction. “Our number one goal is to earn your confidence as a trusted advisor, one who provides you with the right technology and solutions to help you get the most out of your plant. We are working to get to know your most critical issues and problems, how to solve them, and how to make it easier for you to do business with us.”

Van Doren outlined the four elements that Emerson has established as a framework for earning its role as a trusted advisor:

• Connecting to customers
• Technology innovation
• Lifecycle services
• Perfect execution

“The first element, connecting to the customers, means striving to intimately understanding you, the customer, to such a degree that your goals become our goals,” van Doren said. “We want to connect not only on a geographical level, but also organisationally by ensuring that we are able to offer you the right level of industry expertise in any situation.”

“We've begun using an Internal Web Portal to ensure that Emerson's 800-plus industry specialists can tap the best and brightest minds from across our company to solve your toughest problems. We've also created an Industry Tailored Site Assessment Tool to help your engineers and our industry experts develop the best possible process automation plan for your site. Besides a well-trained team of industry specialists, we're also developing pre-engineered industry solutions. These are proven combinations of technologies and services tailored for specific applications. We have over 20 of these solutions ready to offer you so far, with many more on the way.”

The second strategic element, technological innovation, has always been Emerson's strong suit. As van Doren illustrated, the company has recently made great strides toward shaping its technology around the user, rather than requiring the user to adapt to the technology. One successful application of human-centred design is electronic marshaling with CHARMs, which has greatly reduced the complexity of project engineering and scheduling. “We're applying human-centred design to more products all the time, even re-designing some of our existing products for better usability and maintainability,” van Doren said.

Integrated operations (iOps) centres are another leading technological trend in process automation today. They offer a way to make a wide range of information from multiple areas available not only to operators, but also to specialists who can analyse and troubleshoot problems from halfway around the world. Mr. van Doren encouraged attendees to visit the iOps demo in the Technology Exhibition Centre for a closer look at how this state-of-the art approach is rewriting the process management rulebook.

“One of the themes that has come through loud and clear in our customer surveys is that you want us to work harder to help you get the most out of your investments,” van Doren continued. “This leads us to our next element: lifecycle services. We are investing heavily in your neighbourhood. In Europe alone, on average, we are opening one new Service Centre per quarter to provide local repairs, spare parts and full turnaround support. We have also developed a Plant Turnaround Program to help you complete your revamp or renewal projects as efficiently as possible.”

“Finally, to help you improve your operations, we need to improve our own operations. Perfect project execution, the fourth element of our strategic direction, means simplifying our business processes, being more consistent, and meeting delivery dates whenever and wherever they are. We want to make sure we have what it takes to meet your needs on every single project.”

“To that end, we've added more than 500 project personnel in the past year, bring our total up to more than 5,100. And we're extending the role of our Project Management Office, whose sole purpose is to develop common tools, processes, and expertise to standardise our best practices company-wide. We are also shortening our supply chains, harmonising our processes among business units, and adding emergency shipment capabilities. As a result of all this, our on-time delivery and lead times are the best they have ever been in Emerson's history.”

“Like the pilot of a high performance race car,” van Doren concluded, “you face many challenges that come in your direction at an ever increasing speed. And like a pilot, you must be able to react quickly to those challenges. You need to be able to fully trust the team that's behind you. Our hope is that you will trust us to be the business partner that you can rely on, and that you will trust us to be part of your team. Because when the right people with the right technology come together, magic happens.”