Puffer-Sweiven offers a comprehensive suite of control system Life Cycle Services (LCS) for Emerson Process Management, Fisher Controls Flow Automation and Schneider Electric automation products.  LCS address all aspects of automation systems operating performance after system commissioning.  LCS include corrective and planned maintenance, software and hardware updates or upgrades, reliability improvement studies, migration planning, and technology utilization improvements.

Control System Optimization and Utilization

Puffer-Sweiven’s Control Systems (CS) Specialists have an average of over seventeen years of process control and automation experience in the chemicals, petrochemicals, refining, and power industries.  Their unit operations expertise covers batch and continuous reactors, distillation, fluidized beds, boiler/furnace controls and utilities, sequencing, material handling, tankage and custody transfer.

These experts can assist in troubleshooting or optimizing any existing control strategy running on your Emerson Process Management, Fisher ROC or Modicon system.  Control strategies are designed for steady-state operations that rarely exist.  Oversized process equipment combined with mis-applied instrumentation compound plant operational problems.  Our CS Specialists can rapidly identify the root cause of problems and the proper combination of changes.  Loop tuning to dampen process response is simply not the answer!!

CS Specialists can also help you maximize your usage of the control system technology that you purchased.  Embedded tools like loop monitoring and tuning, instrument diagnostic alerts, fuzzy logic, neural networks and multi-variable predictive control all exist within the basic process control system (BPCS) environment that we supply.  These embedded technologies are easily and inexpensively implemented by your plant’s Process Engineers. Let our CS Specialists show you how.

Control System Maintenance

Our factory certified Field Service (FS) Specialists have an average of nearly fifteen years of BPCS and PLC installation, troubleshooting, preventative and corrective maintenance experience. Our FS Specialists also maintain Dell Premiere Access certification.  These highly qualified service professionals participate in initial project planning and system installation, ongoing system migrations and daily maintenance support.

The FS Specialists also manage and implement System Support Agreements (SSA), which are formal contracts for specific maintenance services and system updates.  SSA’s are a cost-effective combination of services and associated products to augment your maintenance staff’s core capabilities.

SSA’s can combine or incorporate any of the factory supplied services described above.  SSA’s define spare parts availability and spares management at a fixed annual cost, guaranteed emergency onsite access to FS Specialists, define pre-paid or T&M corrective maintenance labor and pre-paid planned system maintenance, including annual consumables.  Special system upgrade planning and implementation labor can also be defined in these contracts.  Our SSA’s are reviewed annually so you can add or delete content to reflect your system’s support needs.

For more information on any SSA contract options or field service capabilities, contact your local Systems and Solutions sales person at LifeCycleSolutions@puffer.com.

Operator Training

As part of an automation project or for an existing process unit, Puffer Sweiven can design an economical operator training systems that provide ongoing operational benefits.  Our CS Specialists work with your Operations management and training staff to specify custom training content around a single process unit or your entire plant.  We combine our unit operation knowledge with multiple control system and hardware simulation technologies to uniquely animate process conditions.  Because this is not first principles modeling, our animation runs in real time on the same operator consoles used in the unit.

These systems have the ability to freeze, re-play and speed up animation dynamics.  From a training station, instructors can initiate failure scenarios and capture operator responses.  Formerly, this training system functionality cost millions of dollars and man-years to implement.  We provide this functionality at a fraction of the price and can be completely developed in months.  Let us show you how you can do it.

For more information on our unique training system capabilities, contact your local Systems and Solutions sales person at LifeCycleSolutions@puffer.com.