Emerson integrates analytics with asset management software

Emerson has announced data server technology that should help process manufacturers improve performance and sustainability by breaking down the data silos that make it difficult to digitally transform their reliability and maintenance strategies.

Emerson says the AMS Device Manager Data Server securely extends intelligent field device data to outside systems to make it easier for reliability and maintenance teams to further capitalise on modern advanced analytics software, providing a step change in operational efficiency and smart manufacturing.

For decades, process manufacturers have relied on asset management software to carefully deploy and monitor plant production assets — like measurement and analytical instrumentation, digital valve controllers, wireless gateways and others — both within a single plant and across the enterprise. As plants have evolved, they’ve grown their technology stack to adopt a wide range of analytics, historians, machine learning and advanced modelling to exploit and benefit from historically underused or inaccessible datasets from around the plant.

AMS Device Manager Data Server is designed to publish intelligent field device data nearly instantaneously to industrial software analytics solutions already in use by organisations, eliminating the need for complex custom data integration and manual workarounds that often cause delayed results and siloed data. Emerson says the data is relayed via secure industry protocols.

"To accelerate sustainability and profitability, today’s manufacturers are transforming via analytics — seeking to aggregate disparate, underused data and further exploit it for positive business impact around the organisation,” said Erik Lindhjem, Vice President of Emerson’s Reliability Solutions business. “AMS Device Manager Data Server makes intelligent field device information such as configuration parameters, alerts, calibration data and others available, in near real time, for advanced use in other software and applications our customers already use.”

According to Emerson, AMS Device Manager Data Server makes it easy to import critical instrument and valve data into common dashboarding tools and applications like Microsoft PowerBI, Emerson software tools such as the Plantweb Optics platform, Plantweb Insight, Aspen MTell and AspenTech Inmation, plant historians and others.