NPRA Conference - Part 5 again?

Time again for the annual NPRA Technology Forum. 

This is about the fifth conference I have been to this year, and each time I go to one of these industry conferences, I hear the same top two topics being discussed in earnest.

1. There is impending doom from the shortage of engineers.
2. How we can avoid impending doom from industrial incidents like that of BP Texas City.

These seem to be the two top conference topics all around the country and at all venues, except maybe where there is no oil refining presence, in which case only the first topic comes up again and again. 

These topics are bad news for industry, but contain good news for PAS.

Here’s why….

The shortage of engineers is really, really bad news for industry.  After all, most of the engineers in the process industry are baby boomers – meaning that most of them will disappear off to Costa Rica or otherwise go silent in retirement somewhere else.

And who’s going to maintain and improve the process plants of today once these people are all gone?  (Not me – I’ll be in Costa Rica with everyone else J)

It’s not even what you can see that’s the problem – worse yet, is the maintenance of what you can’t see – all the logic and algorithms that actually keep our process plants operating in a safe place.  Heaven forbid that these systems and applications become unavailable or unmaintainable, for who would then decipher whatever it is that they are supposed to do? 

Certainly not the guys in Costa Rica!

That’s the bad news for industry.

But the good news for PAS is that we have a documentation and configuration management solution that is pointed EXACTLY at this problem.

Integrity – don’t operate your plant without it™.

Read more about that here.

The second item – 15 people being killed at Texas City – is being analyzed over and over by various groups, almost to the same extent as the Challenger disaster.  All that’s missing is the Presidential Report on the topic.

Accidents and the possible over-regulation by the authorities are bad news for industry.  Nobody wants loss of production, let alone loss of life.

And by now, everyone in the refining and petrochemical industry has heard the story of one level – one alarm – one operator as retold by Ian Nimmo at the PAS 2006 User Conference (download paper here) and countless others in the industry.

Very bad news indeed.

But again, the good news for PAS (if we can call it that) is that we have solutions pointed EXACTLY at this area.

Our Alarm Management solutions – written up in multiple textbooks (PAS, ISA), presented in workshops worldwide, and delivered by our team of experts – leads the way in loss prevention, reliability and safety across the process and power industries.

Haven’t heard of it?

Better buy the book and start reading.

In the meantime, be careful out there – with the shortage of engineers, we can’t afford to lose even one, whether by industrial accident or firing due to poor performance.

Later…

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