The latest Manufacturing Excellence has just finished a successful convocation in the heart of the English countryside in rural Warwickshire. This "essential conference for operations, engineering and maintenance managers in their process industries" was a joint venture with Emerson,, Huntsmannn, Aker Kverner, BASF and the IEE.
As always the event started with a series seven one day intensive training sessions on the Tuesday. These courses ranged from the basic "Introduction to process control" to the topic "A day in the life of the Plant-Asset Opitimisation." These courses were very well attended.
The main conference started on the Wednesday with a keynote talk on "Working together - Collaboration and Innovation," where Paul Sharratt of UMIST talked about something that is sometimes missing in modern companies, the culture of sharing. Especially in this age of mergers and acquisition the existance of corporate amnesia is unfortunately very common. Companies often repeat mistakes.
It was impossible to attend all the interesting talks so we won't attempt to do so but merely give a brief flavour of some of the talks.
Clive Timms of Asset Integrity Management talked the pain and gain of the safety standards IEC 61508 & 61511. There are many misconceptions about what the costs and implications in a plant are but these may not be as frightening as first envisaged and profits can be added to by compliance.
Traditionally the three areas of Acquisition Systems, Control Systems and Safety Systems have largely occupied three quite separate markets. However in more recent times developments have tended to bring them closer together. So that the modern integrated system ought to be open, distributed and encompassing acquisition, control and safety. This was the topic addressed by industry innovator Prof George Turnbull of Open Automation & Control.
In the first of two talks, Harvey Deardon {Time Domain Solutions (TDS)} asked "Who's afraid of IEC 61508?" In the course of this talk he pointed out that recasting of established good practice will largle address IEC 61508 issues. "No need tp rip it out and start all over again."
"What should the vendors do next?" was the provocative question from Rob Lewis of BP Amoco Chemicals. 
He maintained that the ability of I&C vendors to invent new functionality probably exceeds the appetite of
the end user community to adopt them.
Wayne Barnacal (A great surname for somebody addressing a conference on Bloomsday!) from Huntsman Tioxide spoke about the engineer as saviour of the world. Everything that we do has some input from the engineer yet they are often overlooked in favour of the more fashionable accountants and bureaucrats.
A small (?) number of delegates opted for viewing a recording of the 1963 heavyweight boxing match between Cassius Clay and Henry Cooper in which the British legend knocked down the "greatest". What this had to do with manufacturing excellence is difficult to work out but it certainly prepared us for the dinner and networking that night which was addressed by Sir Henry Cooper and at which a sizeable collection was taken up for cancer research.
The second day started with a keynote speech from Erik Britton of Oxford Economic Forcasting when he discussd the economic situation in the UK in comparison with that of the rest of Europe and the world, reasons for its good performance and what its weaknesses perceived and actual. This was a very interesting and unusual contribution to such a conference.
The second talk from Harvey Deardon of TDS told us how to look like a hero in our process plant. Here he looked somewhat whimsically at the project rules to be followed and the pitfalls to be avoided.
One of the most pressing hazards facing modern industry is the question of cyber security. We were particularly interested in this - see our CyberSafe page - and Justin Lowe of the PA Consulting Group did not disappoint. He pointed how process control systems are at risk from cyber atteck and outlined a generic approach to managing these security risks. This approach has been proven recently in a major global energy company. He suggested that we look at their web pages on this topic. (www.paconsulting.com/process_control_security).
Clive Wilby, of BASF IT Servicesdiscussed the costs and issues resulting from poor document and records management, making the case for electronic document management and configuration management as a means of maintaining the document asset up-to-date. (See also our 21 CFR Part 11 page).
2004