Show me the money!

Had lunch with a key customer recently – “Mr. Digitzation” for a leading chemical company.  His job is to review and recommend technologies and strategies for investment at over 30 plants around the world.

So what does he see as most important to his decision process?  The answer was obvious – measurable return to the bottom line. 

Company engineers bring propositions to him for great applications that claim wonderful benefits – many of which have a proven track record – but if they can’t articulate the expected return and how to measure that, it doesn’t make the cut. 

Show me the money, he says, and then we’ll talk.  Maybe.

Our problem… both as vendors and customers, is that we often get excited about new technology applications without working the details – the real hard numbers – of the value proposition. 

We’re pretty good at quantifying financial returns for those applications that directly impact process operations – like advanced control and real-time optimization. 

But for applications that reduce alarm overload, improve critical situation handling, tighten cybersecurity, enable disaster recovery, etc. – this is much harder to do and we often fall short. 

Nice benefits, but like our gatekeeper says – show me the money, then we’ll talk.   

I want us to be the gatekeeper’s counterpart – release no application without the details.  Now that’s worth doing!

Comments

[Sarma Garimella]

At PAS, we have more access to customer data than any other company. We should aggregate the data (to protect customer identity) and present these conclusions back to industry more than we do today. This is good for us and will be good for customers also.

Also, PAS has a lot of great customers that might allow us to talk about specific incidents or potential incidents avoided by alarm management with the estimated benefit. This way we can go to any future client and speak with confidence of the real payback of Alarm Management. For example, at a site I was in recently did not have a 'LL' alarm for a Surge drum in an FCCU unit and there was almost an FCCU unit shutdown when the feed pump to the Unit lost suction because of low surge drum level. A good alarm design and management system would have avoided this “near-miss” entirely.