Grandfatherhood & the Retirement Wave

This weekend, I joined the ranks of millions and became a grandfather. 

Yikes!  Am I getting old, or what?

Young Erik Roland Heersink enters a world where it is getting harder and harder to attract top students into technical disciplines rather than banking, marketing or wherever it is that today’s young adults think they can make more money….

At process plants the world over, companies are faced with a retirement wave that will take more operating experience out in the next ten years than we can ever hope to replace much before young Erik hits the workforce.

>> I’m not kidding about that – attracting, educating and bringing new engineers into our workforce is a problem where solution progress is likely to me measured in decades rather than years.  Some plants report the average age of technicians right near 50 – see Walt Boyes’ posting on that.

One solution to help address the problem is to make our existing talent and the deployment of our intellectual expertise more efficient.

And one way, we’re helping to do that at PAS is by launching the market for asset management solutions that address exactly that – the deployment of intellectual expertise across the automation spectrum, from control schemes to online modeling to advanced analysis.

Our Integrity automation asset management software product stems from years of research and development on how to best manage the multi-system, multi-platform solutions to optimize plant operations.  Optimization based on your best operator, your best simulations, your best market intelligence.

Today, we assign engineers and technical staff to oversee and manage all this stuff – each with their own area of expertise and responsibility.  But that’s so old school… so inefficient…

If we’re serious about making our best and brightest more efficient, we need solutions to lift them above the details of one system or another to get an overall view of how all of these “automation” assets play together – solutions that take them from looking into each system individually to manually figure out interoperabilities.

Because when the retirement wave hits, those left standing won’t have the time to learn individual configuration tools, read manuals, or manually track down data flow.

Integrity is leading the way to provide these efficiencies – giving technical staff at least a 20-25% advantage over how they work today.

Integrity represents one of many solutions, one of many new markets coming to  the process industries  – all because all of our little fellows like Erik just can’t graduate and get working in our plants fast enough!

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