Thursday, December 13, 2007

Ah, escargot I'm back home after the Make2Pack (ISA88 part 5) meeting concluded this afternoon at the Dayton Airport hotel. Overall committee chair, Dennis Brandl, lent his expertise in standard writing by leading the group in a sentence-by-sentence and picture-by-picture review of the latest draft. I've only been privy to a few discussions, but it looked like a tremendous amount of progress was made polishing up the standard. Definitions were finished that would be consistent with ANSI/ISA88.01 as well as letting machinery engineers know that they were embraced by the standard, too. I remain convinced that when equipment can be designed and programmed to this standard, both OEMs and equipment users will benefit. 5:17:41 PM    comment []

Men buy, women shop When you and your better half go to the store, do you have the same attitudes? Here's a study from Knowledge@Emory. They have the usual supply of intelligent business articles. 11:48:28 AM    comment []

Snails racing Sorry to miss a couple of days. Went to Chicago office on Monday leading to a couple of days of meetings. We had the office Holiday Party, so my recently retired wife went up, too. Therefore, not as much working through the night. Yesterday and today, I'm sitting in a meeting of the ISA SP88.5 (Make2Pack) working group thanks to an invitation from chairman Dave Chappel as they review its draft and make final preparations to release for a series of reviews and voting leading to a hoped-for adoption at WBF in Barcelona in November 2008. It's very interesting to see how far the committee has gone with definitions of control that fits within the ANSI/ISA88 Batch Standard but goes on to encompass machine control as well as process control. When you see the guts, you understand why technology providers are waiting for the final definitions. But this will be very powerful when implemented. One of the interesting things is to watch the final draft formatting process. I've been on numerous standards committees (even chaired one), but I've forgotten much of the nitty gritty work. It really drives clear thinking. That's cool. But as one person quipped, writing standards is a little like watching two snails race. It takes so long, you don't care who wins. But you get to eat the winner. Looking forward to the final draft. 10:10:51 AM    comment []