In this discussion, two industry experts compare past and present methods of accessing HART field instruments. A decade ago, technicians had to rely on DCS‑based connections or hard‑wired HART communicators. Today, mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads can directly talk to the instruments, dramatically simplifying configuration and diagnostics. The conversation expands to the broader digital transformation of industrial automation: moving from SCADA‑centric data collection toward flexible, multi‑channel access, edge‑intelligent devices, and direct cloud ingestion. The speakers highlight how this shift reduces engineering effort, shortens deployment time, and creates scalable, data‑rich solutions for customers, positioning Andersen Hauser as a catalyst for the next generation of intelligent field devices.
10 years ago, to talk to a HART instrument, you either went through the DCS or you went out there and connected to it with a HART communicator and physically hardwired it. And now you can, you know, pull your iPhone out or your iPad and communicate to it directly.
That's definitely a significant change because I also remember when I was working at Rockwell, where we were integrating with our customers, helping them integrate ENH equipment, and it was typically connected to the SCADA system. or to the historian and other things. But now you're looking at, yes, that you're still doing that, but at the same time, there's other ways to communicate with it and get data out of it. And so the first step is making it easy for a technician to actually go around and check on the equipment and also easily configure it. Configuring stuff from an iPhone is just so much easier than have to go and send codes back to it, to your SCADA system and get it configured. So that's definitely a big change. But that's the interesting startup. Our discussion around that, I would like to get a better understanding when you say digital transformation, both for your customers and for yourself. So for your customers, I'd be interested to see what are you working on there with that type of equipment? So are you making those sensors connect in other ways than traditionally? So for example, straight to the cloud kind of thing, or is it just that kind of remote connectivity? with an iPhone, but the other information goes— like the traditional historical data goes straight into a SCADA system. Are there other ways to do that today?
Well, I think it's scalable and it's all the above. And I think that's the thing that excited me the most about coming to Andersen Hauser is if you look at a digital world that is starving for data, we're creating the data. We're beyond the edge. We're the intelligent field device. And if we can get that intelligence directly to the cloud, then you can start serving data in a whole different way with a lot less engineering and complexity and configuration time that, that transpired 20 years ago.
