Tuesday, May 19, 2009

MESA News I have some news from MESA -- the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association. First the assiciation has decided to move its conference in North America from Fall 2009 to Spring 2010. The association conducted a survey of members that revealed 68 percent said their companies have travel restrictions in place that will likely stay in place for the rest of the year. 74 percent said that made it unlikely that they would attend the event in the fall. The survey also revealed members placed significant value in maintaining access to MESA's body of knowledge and materials, citing MESA's Website and quarterly newsletters along with regular Webcasts, whitepapers and Guidebooks as important tools. MESA is committed to its European Conference scheduled for October 27-28, 2009 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. That conference's theme is "Survive to Thrive." MESA's Board of Directors challenged the Leadership Teams to meet the challenges of 2009 with programs, materials and tools to shoe its membership ways to dramatically cut costs while improving productivity in manufacturing. In his quarterly message to the membership, John Dyke, MESA chairman, contended, "For manufacturing to take a significant step forward in terms of productivity and cost competitiveness--in spite of, or perhaps because of, difficult economic times, all of the constituents in this landscape need to work together to better understand the complexities of the workflows on the shop floor and how technology must be applied to identify constraints, provide meaningful and standardized metrics and dramatically cut costs." 6:57:53 PM    comment []

Yokogawa User Conference I'm in Houston at the Yokogawa Corp. of America user conference. They have a respectable turnout given the economic downturn and swine flu confusion. CEO and president David Johnson stated that YCA showed an uptick in revenue over the last six months of the fiscal year ending March 2009. Admirable results for what has been a pretty small player in the US (although Yokogawa is large in a global sense). Right now, Brent Lilienthal, general manager of service in NA for Yokogawa, and Dennis Nash, president and CEO of Control Station, are announcing a joint application for PID tuning. Built from CS's Loop Pro, csTuner will look like a Yokogawa CS3000 application. Through diagnosis of process data, csTuner is capable of improving the performance of business-critical production processes. Nash told me the key differentiator of Loop Pro / csTuner is a patent pending technology called Non-Steady State Modeling. This technology enables users to accurately model both transient and noisy process data. 6:43:47 PM    comment []