76 | The Fisher Story
2000s
2000 Emerson spends $600 million on new
technology including FOUNDATION fieldbus and
PlantWeb architecture.
1999 New plant opens
in Nilai, Malaysia.
New products represent 36% of total sales.
900-plus page Control Valve Catalog is published.
Pewter coaster gift for
Nilai’s grand opening
Medway, U.K., plant closes and operations move to
Cernay, France.
Asia-Pacific sales conference in Singapore utilizes the
theme “Team Fisher.”
Fisher Digital Diagnostics
Valve Dog posters
promote core
products, 1999
I
n the old-model Christmas
lights,the failure of one bulb
caused the whole string to go
dark. The fix meant checking
each bulb, one by one.
Well, in the mid-1980s, the
failure of a single control valve
could shut down an entire
process line. Traditional
maintenance meant removing
valves, one by one, for visual
inspections and repairs.
Fisher engineers, like Bill
Fitzgerald and Ken Junk in
Marshalltown, turned their
expertise to control valve
diagnostics and predictive
maintenance. Bill envisioned a
valve performance signature
curve using digital data
collected with a personal
computer. The evolution of
digital communications led Ken
and the development team to
design on-line Performance
Diagnostics that pinpoint
failures and provide
recommended actions.
Product introductions like the
FlowScanner valve diagnostic
system (1990) and the FIELDVUE
DVC5000 Series digital valve
controller (1994) enabled users
to document control valve
performance and use that data to
plan maintenance, rather than
react to failures.
Additions to the FIELDVUE
product family include DVC2000,
DVC6000 and DVC6000f.
In 2005, the 500,000th
FIELDVUE DVC was sold.