Take a look at the people in your control room: you probably see a lot of gray hair. How many of those individuals are still going to be there in another three or five years? To answer this question, we need to look at the retirement rate of the baby boomers that are now between the ages of 55 to 65. On January 1, 2011, the first baby boomers turned 65. According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, dated January 30, 2008, the retirement of baby boomers will affect the overall economy and our industries until the year 2020. The industries affected most will be those that have been part of the structure of the U.S. industry buildup: steel and primary m...

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The customer is the individual who pays the bills. The customer is the group that will use the product. The customer is the executive who judges how well the project meets the business needs of the company. We could add more examples to the list, but each of these customers looks at a project slightly differently and judges it in unique ways. As engineers, we must always try to understand these different viewpoints and be responsive to the needs of the various voices that speak for a collective customer. If we do not understand how different stakeholders offering input on a...

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In the last post I mentioned that you probably had lots of data that you might not even know about all over the place just waiting to be collected and put into your historian. I suggested that if you collected that data you could put the data to work and would probably find out that the data was actually very valuable and quite worth it to have collected. In this post, I’d like to suggest another idea to get more out of your historian. You probably have a data warehouse of some kind somewhere. It’s probably part of a business intelligence initiative and it’s almost certainly owned by the IT department. And, you may not even know it’s there and might never have even used it. And, it probably has no manufacturing data in it and almost certainly has no data from the historian in it. But, it’s probably there. And, there’s probably a lot of people that use it. And, if they k...

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Here are the final suggestions to get the most out of a leadership role by creating an enjoyable and productive experience for you and your team. 5. Keep in touch. Peters and Waterman popularized the concept of “management by wandering around” in their 1982 book “In Search of Excellence.” Email is a great tool, but informal communication such as face-to-face, voice-to-voice, or even chat-to-chat provides much more information about how the work is progressing. Most of us are hesitant to voice our frustrations in a email that can live forever and be forwarded, but a simple, “How’s it going?” may elicit a lengthy and detailed description of any current frustrations or roadblocks that might adversely affect progress. Sometimes shooting the breeze clears the air. 6. Give them what they need. Make sure your team members have everything they need to keep moving forward, be ...

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When it comes to control system training, you’ve undoubtedly heard this phrase said to new folks: “In my day, you applied common horse sense, some on-the-job-training and a couple of days of following me around. After that you just ask questions. Do you have any for me now?” Now, if I was instructing someone on how to rake leaves or sweep out the garage—the above conversation would probably work.  But if you want to ensure that new engineers, operators and maintenance personnel who interact with the control system everyday are capable of doing so, then we need to teach them to be them more sophisticated. First, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is your control system architecture documented and current?
2. Do you have security in place to prevent unauthorized or qualified people from accessing set points?
3. Is there a clear lin...

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