"Take off your shoes, please” was the polite reminder from our SE Asia Regional Director Spencer right as we walked in the control room building of one of the refineries on Jurong Island. Yes. No shoes allowed in the control room. The reason? To keep out dust particles. Let’s just say wearing sandals to a control room isn’t quite the same as a walk on the beach. Minor inconvenience but definitely understood.
Welcome to Singapore!
Entering Singapore through the Changi airport is like walking into a meticulously manicured garden with beautiful orchids, varieties of soft glowing palm trees, perennial flowers and tropical plants everywhere. The trees are pruned to perfection resembling symmetrically shaped umbrellas decorating a cold cocktail. The streets are clean; as clean a shopping mall.
Singapore is a city state of order and organization. The highly educated people of Singapore are hard working, very polite and extremely disciplined. But apparently, it wasn’t always like that in Singapore.
On the way to visit a few of PAS’s long time customers in Jurong Island - a man-made island that is hub to industrial complexes employing over 100,000 workers - our man Spencer gave us a brief background on the recent history of Singapore. According to him, the rapid progress for Singapore began when she gained independence from colonial control post world war II. A sense of national pride, strong leadership and a set of strict rules (sometimes criticized as too harsh) seems to have transformed the character of this young nation in less than fifty years.
And speaking of transformation, it appears our panel of industry executives assembled to discuss the aging workforce at the PAS Users Conference in two weeks is attracting a lot of attention. Registration to our conference is up by 18% compared to the same time last year. There is a lot of excitement these days at PAS with the marketing team organizing to have the best PAS UC ever.
At center stage at this year’s conference will be an integrated demo of our solutions to address the very challenge of the aging workforce and skills gap. Plants can now capture the most complex knowledge about plant production, which reside in automation systems in PAS’s Integrity (DOC3000/DOC4000) software for everyone to everyone. I was told by a customer here in Singapore this week that our DOC4000 software helped them simplify the way they manage their control system and allowed their control and systems engineers to improve their productivity by more than 30%. Think about it. That is, if you have a group of seven engineers, you just increased the output of the team by two headcounts simply by enabling them to get their job done faster and with higher accuracy by using Integrity software.
Now that is a clever way to deal with the aging workforce and the shrinking pool of automation experts.
What do you think about that? Drop me a comment. Let me know what you think.
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