Emerson's Colin Nelson joins our 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert podcast series. Meeting the global demand for energy requires efficient transportation and storage from oil and gas production all the way through the supply chain to the consumer and business users. Colin helps to develop the real-time scheduling and optimization tools to help companies across this supply chain operate more efficiently.

Let me know if there are other Emerson Experts that you'd like to hear from and what you'd like me to ask them.

Transcript

Jim: Hi, everybody. This is Jim Cahill, and welcome to another edition of "5 Questions for an Emerson Expert." Today, I'm joined by Colin Nelson who's a senior software developer for Emerson and he has six years of experience with us by way of Energy Solutions International, who was acquired by Emerson a while back. Colin has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Davidson College. So, welcome, Colin. Thank you for joining us today.

Colin: Thank you for having me on.

Jim: All right. Well, let's start out by asking what made you decide to pursue a STEM-based career?

Colin: So, I've always had an interest in STEM technologies, in particular biology, math, and programming. Starting off, I wanted to be a doctor, but I was really lucky to grow up in a strong STEM household. My dad has a Bachelors in Biology, my mother has a Masters in Mathematics, and they encouraged me to, you know, pursue my interest in all the STEM-related careers. And, I found during high school, I found out playing video games that if you hit this magic button, a little console would come up, and you could enter in these commands that would wind up changing the world around you, sort of a lightweight version of programming. And that sort of led me to explore and discover ways that I could write programs, or write software, and change the digital world around me, and that contributed well to my career in mathematics in college, and has brought me forward into my development role as it is today.

Jim: Well, that's fascinating. So, what got you to that transition into really our world of process automation?

Colin: So, this is actually my first job out of college. I was interested in joining Energy Solutions because I was joining into their pipeline scheduling and optimization team, where it was a fantastic and fascinating space, especially pipeline scheduling, because it gets you the ability to marry the sort of strange differences between the physical real world of mathematics, problem-solving, fluid hydraulics, all of that real world laws of physics things with the business world of accounting, and the, you know, paper trades, the swaps, all the business processes where you actually operate on and change the functionality of what you came at your scheduling with. And so, as the team grew and developed at Energy Solutions, we experienced an amount of success, and we happily joined the Automation Solutions with Emerson.

Jim: Yeah. And, we're glad to have you in the family. Right now, the whole world of pipelines is so dynamic with all this new production here in Texas, and other places brought to us by the Shale Revolution going on. So, that must keep things very exciting for you over there.

Colin: Oh, there is not a dull moment around here.

Jim: That's excellent. So, tell us about a recent challenge that you've been working on to solve.

Colin: So, a new industry or a new branch of the pipeline solutions space with automation that we're branching into is terminals. We have a terminal scheduling and optimization tool. And currently, I'm working on a real-time schedule verifier. You can imagine it as something that sits and is looking at and consuming data from the SCADA systems, from the meters, from the telemetry, getting a real-time view of what the terminal is, and then comparing that with the published projected schedules that the sche...