What do the instrumentation and controls, deployed by companies like Emerson, actually do? And will the rise of AI accelerate their deployment? We have tried to answer these questions by reviewing 30 case studies from Emerson’s product suite. This highlights an end-to-end offering to gather vast quantities of data from, and then optimize industrial assets.
Emerson is a capital goods company, founded in 1890, headquartered in St Louis, Missouri, specializing in instrumentation and controls. The company has 87,000 employees, $17.6bn of revenues, at 26% EBITA margin, and $75bn of market cap at the time of writing.
Emerson highlights that its instrumentation and control systems are used in 50% of North American power generation, 20% of global power generation, 65,000 global wind turbines, 9 out of the top 10 semiconductor manufacturers, 25 of the top 25 life science systems, 50% of recent LNG plants, while 75% of the world’s LNG flows through Emerson valves.
What does this actually mean? In this data-file, we have reviewed 30 case studies into Emerson’s product deployments, to assess what Emerson’s instrumentation and control products are specifically used for; across energy infrastructure, materials, food-processing, shipping and commercial/manufacturing.
Hence for each bar on the chart below, we present a “characteristic case study”, exemplifying the product, what it does, how it works, why it gets deployed, and other interesting numbers.
50% of the case studies cover instrumentation, especially flow measurement (20% of the case studies), followed by level measurement, pressure, temperature and tank gauging. 28% cover control systems. 17% cover other asset management services, such as wireless networking of instrumented devices.
Most interestingly, we wonder whether AI will incentivize more instrumentation. There are certainly signs of rising instrumentation requirements in a more digital world, where access to data is of value. Please see the data-file for specific examples.
Our summaries of each category, and of 30 case studies, are in the data-file. While many case studies did give numbers into cost savings, no case studies noted the cost of deploying the Emerson system, making it hard to appraise IRRs or payback periods. The solutions may be both wired or wireless. Particular strength is seen in power generation, LNG and oil & gas.