PAS Musings

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!

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!

Whatever is Integrity anyway?

With PAS now pushing sales of the Integrity software into new markets, we get the same response from customers who haven’t yet heard of or seen the Integrity software…

>> What is it?

>> Why do I need it?

>> What value does it provide?

Once we get engaged in describing and demonstrating the product, the answers generally become apparent and things fall into place, but depending on who’s doing the talking, this doesn’t always happen as easily or quickly as it should.

I mean, it all seems so obvious to us, but then we’re so close to the product and such a technical bunch that all-too-often we jump right into details without setting the stage on what need the overall solution fulfills.

I’m not going to try and provide a complete answer here, but it basically comes down to increasing engineering efficiency, safety and decision-making abiliies at the plant site.

My previous blog on the iPod analogy provides a reasonable intro to the product – the ability to bring the configuration data from all automation assets (PLC’s, DCS’s, real-time databases, spreadsheets, operator displays and advanced applications) into a single user view without requiring the user to “connect the dots” between various configurations and setups.

If you don’t understand that, just pick any data point in your real-time infrastructure and then go figure out where it is used, displayed, read, written, etc… 

With the advent of user-friendly interfaces for all types of systems, devices and applications across the plant site, the real-time infrastructure is being changed, modified, re-configured each and every day.

So it’s impossible to go to any single location to determine data flow through the plant site, without manually going to each system, device, application or operator interface.

So what is the Integrity software?

It is the tool that provides an up-to-date view of your real-time data flow in your plant. 

And from there, the uses and benefits are tremendous – and like a PC or Excel spreadsheet, how you use it is up to you. 

But if you’re like most users, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Attend one of our Integrity web seminars to learn more.

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!

Foxboro Thrust!

Seems that we’ve hit the mark with the Integrity web seminars as well meeting our success with The Book.

After handling some initial problems with logistics (argh!), the Integrity and Automation Change Manager web seminars are rolling like clockwork.

And whether its through our targeted marketing or just a pent-up demand for  automated documentation tools, customers are expressing a strong interest in the Foxboro IA Data Model (plug-in) for the Integrity software.

We started the year with a very strong set of Honeywell Data Models and then launched our reseller partnership with Honeywell in this area, but we recently finished the Fox IA Data Model and proved its worth at a number of customer sites.

With references and a proven capability in hand, we launched it to the market via a series of webinars and emails.  The web seminar includes a live demonstration of the software and this is cranking up the excitement with customers.

As with Alarm Management, we’ve raised our expectations for performance by the Integrity business in 2006.

+52% is looking good!  Very good indeed!

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!

The Book is HOT!!

The Alarm Management Handbook is hot!! 

 

Hardly a week goes by when some company somewhere doesn’t order multiple copies for its staff.  Oil companies.  Chemical companies.  And most recently a cement company.

We shipped about 100 books in the last two weeks alone – and this even excludes those distributed to our public and private workshop attendees.

And the feedback is consistent from all readers, across all industries – the book adds significant value and hits the mark in terms of helping educate customers.  Click here and then scroll down to read for yourself

Even better, the book is helping drive increased sales – allowing us to increase our sales and revenue plans for this segment of our business for 2006.

Now that is satisfying!

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!

Workshop Frenzy!

Even better than Webinar Mania is Workshop Frenzy….

We ran our first-ever workshop for Alarm Management (in recent history anyway) and the results left me wondering why we didn’t kick this off earlier!!!

Our recent Houston workshop session was a hit – and mainly with companies not yet customers of PAS (to the delight of our sales team).

The Book is obviously making a difference.

Apparently, an erstwhile competitor of PAS heard of our seminar offering and decided to copycat it to the same audience in the same city and with the supposed same content.

Well, good luck to them!

As one of the workshop attendees said, “I attended [the other guy’s] workshop last year and it was all about making the software sale.  The PAS seminar is much more in line with what I expect – actually teaching me about the fundamentals of Alarm Management and not just how to use some commercial software package.”

This customer has it right – a workshop should teach people something they can use to decide on the right approach for projects and software moving forward. 

For those of you that have copies of the Alarm Management Handbook already know, we’re all about teaching the principles and the ability to decide how to best move forward for your plant – not just a commercial software package!

Have a great day – and if you need a real education in Alarm Management, do come and attend one of our Alarm Management workshops offered across the USA in the next 6 months!

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!

Webinar Mania!

Here’s a hit for the summer – Integrity web seminars.

Our marketing department has launched a campaign to increase the awareness of our Automation Asset Business, and web seminars are proving to be much more popular than we anticipated!

It all started with a basic overview web seminar for the Honeywell customers – you will recall that we did an OEM deal with Honeywell, allowing them to resell our Integrity automation asset management product.  Honeywell Automation Change Manager, they call it – click here to read more about how they promote this.

Anyway, like the expansion of the Coca-cola product line to Diet Coke, Coke with   Lime, Caffeine-free Coke, and all the other kinds of Coke on the shelf, our overview webinar has also undergone some serious product line expansion…

If customers want it, we should offer it…  So now we are now offering all flavors of webinars covering the Integrity product and its derivatives – and customer demand remains strong!

Why just last week, we hosted 6 live sessions covering all of the following automation asset management topics:

·         Honeywell Automation Change Manager Basics

·         Integrity Automation Asset Management Basics

·         Intergraph INTools

·         Honeywell Experion

·         LoopSheets Application for Integrity

·         Honeywell FailSafe Controller

In addition, due to popular demand, we also re-ran a webinar on our Wizards – remember them?

And in the next two weeks, we’ll repeat some of the above and add 4 more new automation asset management web seminars, including:

·         Emerson Delta-V

·         Foxboro IA

·         PHD, PI and InfoPlus data historians

·         RMPCT advanced control

All this just when our marketing department thought things were going to be slow this summer!

I guess they might find time for a Cuba Libra over the Labor Day weekend, but  then, I do have plans for further product line expansion to meet additional customer demand….

Boy, is this fun or what!

© Copyright PAS 2006.  No part of this blog is to be copied in full or in part without the express written permission of PAS; but references and web links are more than OK!