Live from Automation Fair: Focus on Safety Automation and Process Solutions

I “just” got in from the above event here in Santiago and despite its size it truly was an automation event with a mixture of both process and factory automation – indicative of the type of industry driving the Chilean economy which is predominantly mining. The event is organised by “Electro Industria” http://www.electroindustria.cl/ Chile’s print automation voice.

I hadn't seen Nancy Bartels' excellent blog post while I was on vacation before I wrote this, which is the draft of my August editorial.

Enabling the Plant of the Future

From an article by Mark Lee dated 6/22/2010:

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- New minimum wage laws, a looser yuan and worker strikes like those affecting Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are raising costs at plants in China’s Pearl River Delta, leading to increased automation of assembly lines.

Jonathan Love's tour-de-force single volume Process Automation Handbook is a necessary reference, right beside Liptak's Instrument Engineer's Handbook, and if I can be pardoned, my own Instrumentation Reference Book, that should be on every process automation professional's desk or bookshelf.

How do you get your basic training, and your refreshers? Do you go to ISA section meetings? Do you read books? Does your employer offer training courses? Do you wander around the InterWebs looking for necessary information? YouTube and Google it? Or do you just wing it and learn what you need to know as you need to do it, and hope your ignorance doesn't cause too much damage meanwhile?

"Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."

From an email to me from Mark Douglass of Longbow Research, by permission:

"This might be dangerous, but you could also let your readers know that if they want to participate in upcoming surveys they can email us. If they become a contact then they get the entire report, too. We really don't need 100+ more contacts but it's always nice to get a few more--at least at the senior or exec level b/c then they would probably have a bigger picture view."

Hanging out on the Twittersphere this morning and came across the following, thanks to Eoin O'Riain at Readout: The Instrumentation Signpost. It's a Frost & Sullivan interview with Sudipta Bhattacharya of Invensys Operations Management. See here for what he has to say.

Seth Godin's blog, which is "must reading" for marketers...and other automation professionals should read him too just to find out what his take is on the near future of technology and society is...talks about the four basic types of customers...you know who you are, and automation marketers are