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Saturday, October 13, 2007 |
I had a very interesting chat with Denise Yuan who is an MBA candidate at UCLA the other day. Every time someone calls me for information on our niche of the industry, I think I learn something new. At any rate, she is doing research on electrical CAD--the sort of thing where you can do control wiring and panel layouts. The last I heard, there were supposed to be some announcements about further integration of this type of information into perhaps PLM information.
As part of her research, she has an online survey. If you use any electrical CAD products or are investigating them, please take a few moments and complete the survey. It would not only help her, but also perhaps help shine some light on this market segment. Thank you.
11:40:34 AM 
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Projity and its open source, software as a service project management offering, Open Proj. Just heard from the company's PR person that they have achieved 100,000 downloads, so they are "well on our way to 7-11 million users." If the people on your projects don't travel, this looks like a viable alternative to Microsoft Project. By the way, when you're evaluating momentum, look for actual users, not downloads. Free downloads are easy. Switching isn't. There are other factors. I once knew a plant that bought a bunch of seats of HMI software from one vendor because it was the corporate standard. But they used software from a different vendor because that's what the engineers and operators preferred working with. At any rate, there should be more information on this area in the December Automation World.
8:00:06 AM
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The new month's articles have been posted at Emory University's Knowledge@Emory site. Couple of interesting Web discussions. One asks if we're at the end of paying for content on the Web. The New York Times has quit charging for extra content. Will the Wall Street Journal follow suit? I saw one of Automation World's competitors try to establish a paid content microsite on its Web site. Haven't heard much about that for many months. Don't know how it went over. Another article at Emory is an analysis of China's growing financial influence.
7:49:06 AM
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My friend Dave Harrold took exception to my post of conversations from ISA regarding definition of controllers. His comment is pasted below. I guess I have two rebuttal comments. First, the names are more relevant to discrete than process manufacturing. Second, it refers more to technology than to function. In this latter case, control is still control.
It appears that not a whole heck of a lot has change in process control for a long time. Perhaps some better software, displays, diagnostics and the like. Perhaps a few would like to morph the name DCS to something else. There's no buzz in that segment. The thing I hear the most is the number of plants where automation is shut off and the processes are running in manual mode. Hmmm. Does anyone have any kind of survey statistics to begin to quantify that situation?
However, on the discrete side of things, there have been tremendous advances over the past 5 years or so. More powerful microprocessors and operating systems have enabled suppliers to blend logic solving with motion control with greatly increased data handling and communications capabilities. Layered on that is a great advance in the state of the art for integrated development programming environments. Therefore, a movement to calling the new platform a programmable automation controller. It's more than a programmable logic controller. Now companies such as Rockwell can take that platform, add some specialized hardware and software modules, and have a viable process control platform, as well. Even though many PLC suppliers tried, they just couldn't come up with a viable DCS competitor until the new technologies arrived. And companies such as Opto 22 can take concepts from process control--like distributed control--and apply them to machine control. Very interesting. So, there is a reason (aside from marketing, which is an entirely different argument) to define what really is a new class of control platform. Just goes to show that there is still quite a chasm between the process and discrete worlds.
I'm not sure who started this controller naming game, but we sure aren't doing ourselves any favors by perpetuating it year after year. If we can't agree on the definition of controller types what chance do we have of solving real problems? In the September issue of InTech, Sam Herb, a well respected individual in the instrumentation and automation industry, did an excellent job of defining controllers and even went so far as to remind us what SCADA really stands for.
7:41:04 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Gary Mintchell.
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