Support staff and facilities are expanding to help customers meet the challenges of today’s process operations - wherever they are
ANAHEIM, CALIF (October 8, 2012) -- Emerson Process Management has embarked on a program to strengthen its support service capabilities for customers around the world. In 2012 Emerson extended its current footprint of 374 global service locations by opening eight full-service facilities staffed by trained, certified personnel. In the next few years the company expects to increase the number of service facilities by nine per year, while expanding its support staff at a pace roughly double the underlying automation market growth rate.
“Our service expansion plans are driven by two challenges our customers face today,” said Emerson Process Management’s Terry Buzbee, president, final control. “Developed countries are losing experienced personnel due to demographic shifts, and process facilities are being commissioned in emerging markets where enough skilled workers are hard to find. As a result, process manufacturers are turning to us more and more for services to keep their assets performing at peak efficiency. Our commitment is to meet these needs with local service center facilities and skilled service teams.”
As the worldwide drive for resources and goods grows beyond traditional markets, Emerson is expanding to provide prompt local service to process operations wherever they are. To date this has included commissioning service facilities in Brazil, Qatar, India, Spain, Italy, China, and Turkey. Within a year the company plans to open nine additional service centers – two in Asia, two in the Middle East and Africa, one in Latin America, and three in Europe. Emerson is also adding new capabilities and support services to meet customer needs that a few years ago didn’t exist or were met by in-house resources.
With the shrinking of plant maintenance budgets and the availability of technology to predict automation asset performance, Emerson has developed a family of reliability services including asset prioritization, on-site or remote asset management, and turnaround planning and management.
More customers are running to failure and also running with less maintenance staff and spares inventory. Emerson is fulfilling that gap with Certified Repair and Quick Ship product manufacturing and service centers. These service centers provide machining, manufacturing, fabrication, actuation, instrumentation and quality assurance, and are designed to operate at faster than factory lead-times to the following KPI Responsiveness Standards:
“Our capability to quickly ship new and repaired products to customers when they need them is critical to getting their plants up and running,” said Buzbee. “We want to be the partner our customers know they can trust to not only get them back on-line, but also keep them running reliably.”
By further augmenting customers’ existing operating staff with Emerson service specialists to help plan the adoption of new technology and maintenance best practices, plant uptime can be improved more quickly and reliably. Customers can also take advantage of Emerson’s extensive online training capabilities to re-skill workers without travel costs or time away from their facility.
”Our mission is to build out all of these local service and execution capabilities in every major industrial cluster within each world area,” said Buzbee.
