Study looks at process automation prospects

The pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries continue to represent the highest growth industries for the worldwide process automation systems market between 2001 and 2006.

The pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries continue to represent the highest growth industries for the worldwide process automation systems (PAS) market between 2001 and 2006, according to ARC Advisory Group's new "PAS worldwide outlook - market analysis and forecast through 2006".

Larry O'Brien, Director of Research for Process Industries at ARC and author of the study said, "The total PAS market grew by less than one percent between 2000 and 2001.

Through 2006, the total industry will only grow at the average annual rate of 3.4%.

In this environment of limited growth, we believe that the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries offer the strongest potential opportunity in the long term".

The pharmaceutical industry continues to undergo the transition from less sophisticated, PLC-based automation architectures to the use of PAS-based batch systems along with equally sophisticated CPM and batch management applications.

Suppliers are strengthening their focus on the batch market as a whole as well as the pharmaceuticals market.

The whole set of FDA, 21 CFR Part 11, and other regulations that must be met by the pharmaceuticals industry also presents many opportunities to PAS suppliers for the development of industry specific software and services.

Food and beverage also has a heavy focus on batch applications and also must meet stringent regulatory requirements for purity and quality.

The HMI/PLC control architectures typically used by the food and beverage industry are now under direct and brutal assault by both PC-based control and the new breed of hybrid scaleable automation systems on the market today.

The food and beverage industry is also beginning to adopt more sophisticated software applications that are typically used in continuous process industries such as refining and chemical.

Although PAS and PLC suppliers continue to serve their respective traditional process and discrete markets, the boundaries between process and discrete automation systems are blurring.

Already, process suppliers and discrete suppliers have begun to encroach on each other's territory.

A prime example of a hybrid process is the brewing industry, which incorporates sequential, batch, and process control in the brewing process and high-speed discrete control in the bottling and packaging process.

The majority of both process and discrete suppliers now have control system offerings specifically designed to address the hybrid market.

Many PAS suppliers, for example, are already developing their own discrete businesses.

The hybrid industries typically incorporate PASs and batch control systems on the process side and high-speed PLC-based control on the packaging side.

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