Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) has secured a five-year agreement to provide maintenance, support and project delivery to Refining NZ, New Zealand’s sole oil refinery, through the HPS Assurance 360 program.

Software defined everything is all the rage in the IT industry. Now Honeywell is applying the concept to process automation.

Over a hundred Honeywell process control users have held their annual users conference on the Gold Coast.

Honeywell has launched a new service which it says is designed to help manufacturers in the processing industries get their plants up and running faster and at lower cost.

Honeywell has just released the latest version of its Experion PKS Orion process control solution, while reminding companies that today’s global business environment requires organisations to be “more flexible and responsive to the changing supply and demand conditions.”

Honeywell has released a major enhancement to its Refinery and Petrochemical Modeling System (RPMS) which it says will improve model building and maintenance, case management, and optimisation to help plants maximise profitability.

As we look ahead at what the year might hold for engineers and IT staff working in the process industries, one thing is clear. The industry challenges that afflicted companies in 2013 look set to remain in 2014 - a rising cost of doing business, continued market volatility and a chronic shortage of skilled talent to meet ongoing production demands in Australia.

In today’s industrial organisations, we have seen an ever-increasing need for convergence  between IT departments and the control room. As automation systems become more advanced, their ability to capture information relating to processes has become both simpler and more effective.