PAS Musings

No obstacle stops our man from PAS

The other day, I had d inner with an old friend from up in Canada, where he said the temperature was ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY degrees (over 70C) colder than it was in Houston.

But if you think that’s pretty extreme, then read on as to what lengths PAS professionals fight through any kind of weather and transport to get the job done.

Here’s how one of our Middle East professionals makes his way to ExxonMobil's Sakhalin Island site to complete an Alarm Management job…

For the last 3 weeks I had been to Russia on company business over at the Sakhalin Island site (east cost of Siberia).

Coming from the Middle East, the very first thing that hit me after landing was the chilled climate... it was freezing well below zero with light winds.

After a day's rest the journey from one site to another began.

It was tough jumping between choppers, cars or Kamas (monster truck – more later) with my luggage in such a freezing climate.

On one occasion we travelled by Land Cruiser for 3 hours on a slippery and bumpy road.   In a couple of instances, the Land Cruiser slipped and turned and went into a complete reverse spin. The car and journey was very memorable (yikes!) and hats-off to the driver was really skilled and expert in driving on such conditions.

But much more memorable was the travel to the off-shore location.

For this travel I had to wear shark suit since we were traveling by chopper over water. Wearing that suit was very difficult as it had 2 layers which use to seal your complete body and also insulated it from freezing water. I felt like an astronaut since i could not lift my feet for more than 2 steps.

On return journey, I had to take a Kamas to get to the train station. Kamas is something like giant 6-wheel monster truck which is widely used in the remote parts of Russia since it the only reliable way through the muddy/bumpy roads (but they didn’t tell me this before when Land Cruiser was fine enough!!)

Finally, I was glad to be back in the desert kingdoms of the Middle East, where the temperature was a wonderful 35 degrees C (94F)

Am I missing the cold and chilled weather in Russia? 

No.

Did the job get done?

Yes.

And the client is happy!

And that's exactly the kind of dedication you can expect from all PAS professionals - nothing shall come in the way of us getting the job done!

© Copyright PAS 2008.  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!

Read all about it!

We’ve known for a while that our Alarm Management was hot.

Thousands of books sold, millions of alarm points analyzed & rationalized, etc, etc.

But now ARC elevates the conversation about just how hot our Alarm Management is with their analysis of the topic.

Check out these quotes from a recent ARC briefing on why YOU need to look into PAS Alarm Management at your plant:

Alarm management has the potential to transform the role of the operators. 

A good alarm management program can free the operator … and allow them to focus … on making intelligent decisions that improve productivity and plant performance.

In our view, the passion … comes through in the book, “The Alarm Management Handbook – A Comprehensive Guide” written by Bill Hollifield and Eddie Habibi. It is an excellent guide to effective alarm management.

They [PAS] put their knowledge and intellectual property in the book for everyone to use and benefit from. 

If you haven’t yet read THE BOOK, Buy It Now or get the ISA Version.

Click here to read the full ARC report.

© Copyright PAS 2008.  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!

Ruffled Feathers…

Apparently one or more of my prior postings has ruffled the competition – at the expense of educating the market!

In those postings, I lampooned the “Consumer Reporting” style of software analysis by the geniuses at the ExperCompany – check out the ExperSchlock II and ExperSchlock I postings if you missed it …

And now, just when the ExperSchlockies were hoping it was all a thing of the past, here comes an email into my Inbox from an industry friend who used to work at PAS (but left for family reasons):

Recently, a co-worker and I met an old friend of his for lunch, and it turns out he is now the guy who is the Houston Expertune office.

He said they are a little ruffled about your blog entry… J

He was saying that they are having lots of trouble getting data from the customers so they can do benefit analyses… usually it involves trying to get some kind of data out of IP.21 and they are resorting to Excel add-ins and such to capture the data – he was moaning about how difficult it is to get the customers to take the time to do it, and to teach them how to do it.  Of course the sheer data quantity is daunting, and I would hope that they realize a lot of the data they are getting is going to be compressed and thus not really useful.

I held my tongue but it was nice to know that we solved all of those problems in ControlWizard back when I was still at PAS. 

Y’all should be able to stomp these folks. J

Music to my ears….

Click here to read more about ControlWizard, and to check out some of my other prior blog postings on the topic!

© Copyright PAS 2008.  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!