The Coalition of Open Process Automation unveils COPA QuickStart for open process automation. Jul 21st, 2021 Since about 2015, when Don Bartusiak, the then chief engineer at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, publicly advocated for the development of a new, standards-based, open—yet secure—process control architecture, the industry has been working to solve the problem of proprietary vendor lock-in. In 2017, The Open Group, a vendor-neutral technology consortium, launched the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF), and began work on developing business guides and the Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS), which is currently on version 2.1 O-PAS version 3.0 is not yet released, but it does promise to deliver a usable system. So, as the standard matures and user labs are set up across the world, the next step is to start deploying O-PAS enabled products.