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Weathering the Downturn
The state of the economy tops every conversation these days.
What caused it, when did it start, how bad is the hype on TV, when will we get out? I’m writing this from Orlando, where the ABB Automation and Power World conference is going on—with more than 3,200 attendees from 40 countries. The week before, I was on vacation in Israel and Egypt. The international exposure does nothing to change the conversation. This is a worldwide downturn.
Overseas, there were subtle and not-so-subtle references to the United States banking system as the cause of the difficulties. And assuredly, much culpability lies there. New ABB Chief Executive Officer Joe Hogan devoted much of his keynote address to the subject from a global perspective. His feeling is that when the banking system situation stabilizes, then the worst will be past and rebuilding can begin. Not surprisingly, Hogan and his team believe that ABB is well positioned for the recovery.
Hogan had a slide showing the stimulus packages proposed or enacted in many areas of the world. Then he broke it down into infrastructure investments—especially in power infrastructure.
Use stimulus funds
Many Automation World readers think of ABB as a process control technology supplier, but it is actually a power and automation technology supplier. In order to help its customers, as well as itself, take advantage of all this spending, the North American regional headquarters has established a team to learn how to deal with the U.S. government. It will establish relations with the various administrators involved with stimulus plan spending, and work out what the specifications and... Read more
» Pinto's Prose: The “Genome” of Your Automation System, by Jim Pinto
For automation end-users, competitive advantage comes from knowledge that stays ahead of the game.
Beyond the use of commercially available automation systems, the unique mix of products, equipment, software and the way they are adapted to the specific requirements becomes proprietary “embedded” knowledge.
Monitoring and control systems operate through the correlation, aggregation, display and adjustment of diverse information: set-points and adjustments, desired outputs, review of real-time and historical data, monitoring of failures, minimizing down-time and the like.
System complexity tends to increase in the continuous drive for better efficiency and productivity, as automation systems pursue increased effectiveness through monitoring and control of increasing numbers of input/output (I/O) points. The operator interfaces become increasingly complex, so that more and more operator expertise and training and are demanded.
Where does one find enough good operators to train, and how long does it take to train them? Improved effectiveness comes not from training the operator to use increasingly complex systems, but from developing systems that adapt effectively to maximize throughput with a minimum of operator involvement.
For example, operators can acknowledge and attempt to correct just a few alarms. But, under really adverse conditions, human intervention is ineffective, and the control system must be self-correcting and self-optimizing—which means that the system must adapt heuristically to reduce, not increase, the need for operators.
Beyond just displaying measurements, trends and alarms, effective systems demand diagnostics. Traditionally, this has been failure analysis—after a problem has occurred. But improved effectiveness comes from... Read more
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