Barco

Today’s energy and processing plants rely on sophisticated industrial automation solutions to monitor and manage production and processing activity around the clock and across the globe. Having a high-performance, reliable information management platform that accurately displays large volumes of graphic and sensor data, while greatly enhancing remote collaboration, is essential to making fast, effective decisions when minutes count.

Visualizing the future of industrial automation
The Emerson Executive Briefing Centers offer customers an immersive, hands-on experience of the latest technology for process management operations in the control room. Barco’s video walls, 3D stereo projectors and collaboration software combine with Emerson’s control, automation and management solutions to create an integrated, fully collaborative platform that enables users to dynamically display, configure and share all types of rich data about their supply and operations.

“We have partnered with Barco to develop our Executive Briefing Centers because of their vast expertise in advanced visualization for the process control industry, which is represented in the excellent quality and high reliability of their solutions,” comments Duncan Schleiss, Vice President Platform Strategy for Emerson Process Management. “Their products integrate seamlessly with our technologies to create a robust, flexible platform that can be quickly customized to customers’ specific needs.”

Integrated platform enhances situational awareness
The Barco LED-lit rear projection video wall displays critical video feeds and important process data with crystal-clear resolution for precise viewing, including real time  stereoscopic content captured by Barco Galaxy NW-12 projectors. The CMS control room management software suite enables users to create dynamic perspectives of data, graphics and video to display a complete visual overview of a situation.

The networked aspect of the platform brings together all of these sources to create an easy-to-use, robust operational picture that enhances situational awareness across the enterprise, centralizing information from remote sites, like oil platforms and tankers, to display on the large screen or individual monitors. Local and remotely-based consultants, executives, and operations staff can easily view data simultaneously to solve issues and troubleshoot problems in an efficient, collaborative way. To showcase this feature to customers, Emerson's Executive Briefing Centers in Houston and Austin are connected to enable remote collaboration originating from either site, with the ability to interchange control video wall content.

Increased collaboration for faster, better decision-making
Emerson also selected Barco ClickShare – a one-click wireless presentation and collaboration system – not only as an integral part of its industrial automation platform, but also for use in its own offices to facilitate information-sharing among employees.

“From the control room to the boardroom, Barco offers a robust, yet easy-to-use collaboration tool that enables users to share their information with a group,” comments Michael Boudreaux, Director Remote Asset Monitoring and Analytics for Emerson. “Because ClickShare allows people to present content from their laptop, tablet or even smartphone on a central display, we can pull people together quickly and fully illustrate the big picture, as well as relevant details, to facilitate problem solving and issue resolution.”

“Barco’s collaborative visualization platform enables effective collaboration wherever decision makers may be located to provide a comprehensive solution for iOps centers. ClickShare facilitates visual collaboration inside meeting rooms, while our CMS (Control Room Management Suite) can connect multiple iOps centers to push critical common operation picture data across many decision-making centers,” comments Suchit Rout, Director Global Strategic Alliances for Barco.

As Emerson opens additional Executive Briefing Centers across the globe, Barco’s collaborative networked visualization platform will play an integral role in their integrated oil & gas ind