Emerson enhances asset management software to improve decision support

A new release of Emerson’s AMS Device Manager helps improve plant reliability with better organised data for more informed and proactive management of field devices. New embedded tools allow project and operations teams to customise plant device hierarchies, project tracking, and device alerts, delivering improved decision support – a key competency of digital transformation. With AMS Device Manager, Emerson is helping teams effectively use device data to deliver more reliable operations and shorten project engineering timelines.

Many plants struggle to manage thousands of devices in complex and often out-of-date plant device structures (hierarchies) – often using long, disorganised lists that make it hard to find and identify critical devices. Without having devices organised by zone, asset, unit, or other category, teams have access to health data, but little insight into where a faulty device is located or how it is impacting production data. However, creating or rearranging this hierarchy used to be a time-consuming, manual process, for which few organisations had the spare time or resources.

AMS Device Manager’s enhanced bulk transfer functionality changes this paradigm, providing the tools to configure whole systems automatically – including set-up of device alert monitoring and plant hierarchies. Users can simply export a tag list and open it in a spreadsheet application to enter a location and alert group for each device. Then, using bulk transfer, users can instantly set up the system with an accurately populated hierarchy and alert monitor. With a correctly defined plant hierarchy, maintenance teams can visualise device data in targeted views, allowing them to better evaluate and manage the reliability of specific areas of the plant. This is particularly useful during shutdowns and turnarounds when selected plant areas are down for maintenance.

“An accurate data backbone all the way down to the device level helps build the foundation for digital transformation with a more accurate picture of asset health,” said Mani Janardhanan, vice president, Plantweb™ product management. “With the new AMS Device Manager, users can prepare their plant’s data infrastructure for technologies such as Plantweb Optics that will digitally enhance maintenance practices with data they can trust for decision making.”

Maintenance teams commonly have difficulty separating critical alerts from irrelevant alerts. With the updated AMS Device View – the browser-based interface for AMS Device Manager – maintenance can assign devices to specific projects and track them on separate project dashboards, avoiding the distraction of alerts flooding the operations dashboard. This organised alert delivery allows more efficient response during periods with significant changes, like shutdowns, turnarounds and outages.

The newest version of AMS Device Manager also increases safety and security with system-wide automated locking of devices. Organisations can protect against unauthorised changes to devices without relying on physically adding or removing jumpers. Customisable software-based locks can be enabled for select personnel for specific amounts of time, after which the system will automatically relock the devices to ensure that device configurations are protected.

AMS Device Manager is a technology within the Plantweb digital ecosystem. The Plantweb digital ecosystem leverages IIoT technologies, software and services to expand digital intelligence throughout a workforce, augmenting workflows and processes to create new efficiencies and competencies that affect cultural and behavioural change within a company.