Ucds Podcast 1
Mycontrolroom.com’s first podcast. This is our overview video. Check it out and let us know what you think.
The podcast can be view here on the blog or directly in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast//id485498993
API RP 754 NewsAs a result of recommendations from the Texas City Baker report a new API Recommended Practice, RP 754, is in final draft awaiting ANSI approval. This new RP provides guidelines for the reporting of process safety key performance indicators (KPIs). It is expected that the guidelines will identify 4 tiers of indicators based on the severity of the incident. The highest level, Tier 1, will be a loss of primary containment (LOPC) of ‘greater consequence’. In other words an unplanned and uncontrolled release of any material that could harm people, have an impact on the community or damage to equipment. Although this relates to any material, threshold quantities will be set. Tier 2 is a LOPC of ‘lesser consequence’. The determination of Tier 1 and Tier 2 events are defined in the RP. Tiers 3 and 4 are, respectively, a challenge to the safety system(s) and a challenge to the operating management systems. These are expected to be defined by each facility to meet their particular requirements and data availability. Such guidelines are long overdue and we are eager to see the final documents, and how industry reacts to their content. API RP 755 NewsThe much anticipated API recommended practice RP 755 is expecting draft approval from ANSI this week. The RP focuses on helping companies reduce employees’ levels of fatigue on regular shifts, extended days and turnarounds. Some of the recommendations include baseline staffing assessments, recommended shift patterns and fatigue countermeasure considerations in the design of the control room. The guideline recognizes the impact of such issues as correct lighting, acoustics and console ergonomics. Be sure to follow this blog as we discuss the implications of this new RP August 2008August News – 2008July came and went pretty fast for UCDS. I was traveling all month visiting the World’s largest coal mine where I am helping them with some ergonomic issues and a new central control room and I also had a fast-paced visit to Tokyo where I visited with new and old friends at Yamatake.
I was pleased my good friend Tsutomu Takai was looking after me – and he did it really well. Fortunatelymy tea habit was met with the The supermarkets were well stocked and even though I knew the word for milk, I did not now the Kanji Characters. However, a few simple words and my goal was achieved. I had milk for breakfast, not sure if it was 2% but it was close enough. I finished the end of the month working in Houston, Texas. I guess it was a humid travel month for me. I introduced Rusty to some of my favorite spots in downtown Houston. We meet up with some folks from CCE and went to see our new office and showroom near IAH Airport. Very nice, you must make a point to see it. What about Dave? He and Rusty made a trip to one of our clients in New Orleans and then he vacationed the rest of the month in England enjoying all the things that I would. He now has a lot of catching up to do! UCDS has also had a busy month sending out proposals. We have a lot of clients expressing interest in control rooms, control room operator and field operator workload and staffing assessments, and at last the high Performance HMI is becoming a reality on many projects. It is great to see Honeywell really endorsing our work. They have made a great video of the control room and operator support tools we did for Worsley Alumina. We have really exploited the power of Experion and the customer is getting that important ROI we all talked about. http://mediaservices.honeywell.com/HPS/testimonials/Worsley_Alumina.wmv Please get the word out… UCDS is actively looking for a new employee to generate proposals, track projects, and follow-up before and after sales. This individual should be an engineer who would like to learn from our experienced engineers and eventually become a consultant. This is an entry level position and we are open to graduates and engineers with just a couple of year’s experience. July 2008July 2008 – Happy Birthday America!!! I had a great 4th of July and I hope you did also. What a special time for Americans, what a history, and what great character, something to truly celebrate. This is my favorite holiday after Christmas. I was in Red River, New Mexico this year and enjoyed a parade and celebration. On a sad note, I missed my daughter Beverley becoming a citizen. She was not given much advance notice and we were miles away and could not get back in time for the ceremony. Congratulations Bev, what a great day to be made a citizen. While I was fishing, Dave and Rusty were in New Orleans working, sorry guys. Rusty just started a job in Chicago which will keep him busy for a while. Now that I am back from vacation, I will be keeping busy on several projects and travelling to Tokyo to join Yamatake for a few events. I will be speaking at the PSE 143 Conference and also giving an Alarm Workshop while I am there. It is nice to be truly International. I have great news from John Moscatelli; a new baby is on the way! Congratulations to both him and especially Beth. I hope to be seeing John in a couple months in Philadelphia. It will be great to catch up and share some stories. Our good friend Angelo from Worsley Alumina recently visited while attending the Honeywell User Group. We had a nice dinner and a few games of pool in my man cave. It was great to see him looking so well and enjoying his job. He was not speaking at the User Group this year, a great loss to those in attendance…Ang does it so well! ——————————————————————————– It is interesting to see how the world evolves together at a similar pace and each addresses the same issues, but culture drives a slightly different solution. It is great to see the Engineering community adopting the same or similar rules and good engineering practices. We all have the same challenges, the same incidents, the same restraints and restrictions, yet we look to technology and quickly adopt the off-the-shelf solutions which make us similar. This brings me to this month’s topic – “Good Engineering Practice” It sounds good but what is it, who defines it, where do we learn it? A friend of mine recently reminded me when you have been in the business for as long as I have, 40 years this year, (scary) that I often take things for granted and think that everyone knows what I know. Not that I am claiming to be a master, but I am a solid Engineer who has learned Human Factors. I have implemented and installed many control systems and have certificates from pneumatics, electronics, plc’s, DCS and whatever is out there. How do we pass this knowledge down to this new generation? How do they learn when they are rushed from job to job, with minimum budgets, no training, no real project management experience and all they see is what the guy who went before them has done? How do they get their hands around implementing a state of the art alarm management systems, where will they have seen one, what books will lead them in the right direction? Oh, if the problem was only so simple. This same person is now faced with how to implement a state of the art Human or Computer Machine Interface (HMI or HCI). Certainly the young engineer will discover that less has been document on this topic than on alarm management. The good news is…Bill Hollified, Eddie Habbi and I will be launching a High Performance Graphics book this year. These two topics are a small part of an automation upgrade. We are assuming that this person understands all the engineering knowledge it takes to configure the control system. Once configured, he can ergonomically install it in a room, which we call a control room, and that all things will work together to provide not only good control but will allow the Supervisor of the control system, the operator, the ability to have good ‘Situation Awareness’ and be proactive in monitoring and intervention to maximize efficiency, save costs and ensure safe production. Our plan is to offer more consulting across a broader spectrum of the control business, to partner with like-minded companies to provide a more complete solution and to offer more workshops to pass this knowledge down to this next generation. Many of my peers are getting ready for retirement and we have little in the way of mentoring in the industry. We will try to fill this gap and partner with customers to bridge this void in experience. ——————————————————————————– UCDS is currently looking into producing some video workshops on a range of topics. We hope these additional services will help our customers as we are committed to customer excellence and have accepted and adopted all the Better Business Bureau (BBB) ethics. Please contact me if you would be interested in purchasing video workshops or if you have topics you would specifically like to see covered. inimmo@mycontrolroom.com ——————————————————————————– Please get the word out… UCDS is actively looking for a new employee to generate proposals, track projects, and follow-up before and after sales. This individual should be an engineer who would like to learn from our experienced engineers and eventually become a consultant. This is an entry level position and we are open to graduates and engineers with just a couple of year’s experience. May-June 2008Hello everyone! Sorry for the late publication of the May News – it will now be combined with June. I got tied up with projects and travelling. FYI – we are now well prepared for travel to sites as we have our CLEAR and TWIC cards. In May, I was the Keynote Speaker at the TiPS Conference in Houston, Texas. I also got scolded by Walt Boyes for stealing his speech. Well not really – I just was up first and was obviously on the same wave-length as Walt. Here is what he said: “Well, darn. I have to go re-write my speech I’m supposed to give tomorrow. Ian Nimmo is giving my speech right now. Somehow, we are thinking so much alike that he’s hitting all the themes I was going to talk about. Nimmo pointed out that 100 years ago, life WAS simpler. 50 years ago, we raised our young people to be independent, allow failure, and exposed them to real dangers and we created a generation of incredibly self-reliant and creative people. At the same time, we have created automation systems that mean that the very way operators work is considerably different from the way they worked 50 years ago. We’ve created a whole new category of potential accidents: the Organizational Failure. Further, we measure safety by occupational safety metrics. “How would you feel if the major airlines measured their operational safety by looking at the number of routine injuries occurring to its staff?”” Thanks Walt, we love your Blog. We have been bouncing from one project to another and trying to keep customers on track. We have been working on a variety of projects this last couple of months and have brought on a new Senior Consultant, Rusty Fleming. Rusty graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1976 with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. Early Retiree with over 23 years experience with Union Camp Chemical Division in Savannah, Georgia. While at Union Camp, held several positions as process engineer, plant superintendent, and design engineer. Extensive experience in Tall Oil applications and the Ink Resin field. Certified in Process Hazard Analysis and extensive experience in PSM related issues. Safety Manager for chemical plant in the manufacture of emulsions for waste water treatment. Brief experience in the Pulp and Paper industry with Georgia Pacific as process engineer. We welcome Rusty to our growing family and welcome his experience as we expand our Process Safety Management capability. We have been involved in Staffing Assessments most of this last period with a Management of Organizational Change (MOOC) workshop for one of our customers. The MOOC is based on validating staffing changes and examines the operator’s ability to Detect, Diagnose and Respond to Abnormal Situations. Like most of our methodologies, it focuses on good Situation Awareness. We traveled to Norway again in May. The customer encouraged us to plan this trip around their National Holiday, when all the girls dress in their native costumes. We had a great time with the customer who is developing a new Theater Style Centralized Control Room and is working through a major Staffing Assessment. At the end of the visit, the customer took us out for a very nice traditional meal and visit to the historic town of Fredrickstad. We also meet up with our Human factor friends Mark and Marie…always a good visit as Marie is quite a cook and knows how to put out the welcome wagon. Dave ended the trip in true British form with a couple pints in a British pub in Oslo Center. We have also been working a lot in Ohio and the weather has been really bad. My last night there I was dodging Tornadoes and electrical storms reminiscent of Arizona in the monsoon. We are currently doing three control room projects in this part of the world and our prayers go out to the people who have lost their homes in the terrible flooding. Thanks to our clients for a busy couple of months in: Orange, Texas (great BBQ); a Denver refinery; Phoenix Gas Conference; Lake Charles Refinery in Louisianna; Lima, Ohio; Piketon, Ohio; and Houston, Texas. This month we will be back in: New Orleans, travelling to Canada again, and around most of the States, we have also booked a new project in Cork, Ireland and look forward to a site visit shortly. I will also be on vacation this month visiting Harding MO, and Red River NM. These are exciting times and we are setting foundations for the next 50 years in our industry. It is a pleasure to be working with so many talented people who have captured the vision for achieving operator excellence. I was challenged this month by Dave Harold, one of the writers for a magazine that is doing an article on “Fitting the Workplace to the Worker” and he asked us for customer testimonials. Wow, I have never had to go back and ask the customer for written feedback that will be published. I know it is hard to get permission from our companies to do this, but several customers stepped up to the plate and provided insight and feedback and it was very humbling experience and also a trip down memory lane. We often do not look back on previous jobs, but here is a sample: “Ian Nimmo and User Center Design Services provided value insight to Calgon Carbon in developing practical options to implement a consolidated control room. Ian has the rare ability to quickly analyze the culture and needs of an organization from on site interviews. He accomplishes this thorough his command of the concepts and best practices for process control that allows him to establish immediate rapport with all levels of an organization. Ian’s initial work built a basis to design and configure a system tailored to Plant operations. Ian has been a valuable resource to confirm and identify tools that support the situational awareness model. Periodic follow up discussions have provided need information on best available products ranging from shift change software to walkie talkie head sets.” Peter M. Yacoe, P.E. ——————————————————————————– “Ian has consulted for us in the area of alarm management, central control room design, and process control management and operator workload assessment. He is without doubt one of the world’s experts in the above fields and has assisted us implementing leading edge techniques with definite business outcomes.” Angelo D’Agostino ——————————————————————————– Ian Nimmo was instrumental in helping us establish a company standard for operator graphics at Lyondell. We value his enormous expertise and excellent understanding of situational awareness and consult with him to support our efforts to establish an operational philosophy of operating by awareness. Lothar A Lang, Ph.D. ——————————————————————————– “Ian’s depth of knowledge and ability to persuade the end-user to think beyond their immediate technical requirements to consider people and business process requirements allowed us to design a really comprehensive Statement of Requirements. This both helped us win the implementation project and deliver a successful solution that has the best chance of delivering benefits for many years to come.” Chris Hotblack ——————————————————————————– UCDS brought forth a new perspective and methodology that was not only useful but vital in the changes we are making in our operations group. Michael Wright ——————————————————————————– Once I described him to the operator as the “Godfather” of Situation Awareness and Alarm Management. If you are working in Operations and don’t’ know who Ian Nimmo is, then you have every reason to believe that there are missing pieces in your production. “DON’T BE THROWN FOR A LOOP” once you meet him whether you are a console operator or manager in the refinery. For once it feels good to know the truth about your process or organization even when it hurts. That is because Ian Nimmo provides clear message with guidelines and recommendation that are achievable if it’s on training or behavioral changes, or cultural changes of entire organization. Situational Awareness and Human Machine Interface, Operator Staffing, Work Team Design, and Control Room Design are the services that Ian Nimmo provided to Hovensa, LLC in 2005. I wouldn’t have said for any company what I am about to say for UCDS. They are not promoting their products or services, instead best practices for your company. Based on the complexity equation the impact of his study on console operator staffing at Hovensa was the product of console design for a new processing unit. Based on his recommendation a decision was made in which area would that operating unit would make the best marriage with the rest of refinery. The way Ian Nimmo designed the marriage was meant for the honeymoon to never end. He can transform any abnormal situation into a normal situation using company concepts and his engineering talent. He will reach beyond proposing solutions that concentrate on process core values. He has a rare content expertise in various areas, and ability to collect information and analyze hundreds of unique processes. Whether he is in the control room with operators on Friday evenings conducting interviews, or Sunday mornings in his Nomex out in the unit, or Monday morning in his suit in front of the management, Ian Nimmo makes it possible to bring people and ideas together to make continuous improvements. Think of his ideas as a money pit that you can reach by scooping your resources and transform them magically into Production Centered organization. His publishing’s are another proof of his expertise in the field, and he spices it up with humor to cross the line and paint the visual of your current sad situation. He is the only company who will actually bring you down emotionally with the results of his studies, and bring you up by financially and more safely by leveraging your strengths. Jasna Zekic ——————————————————————————– |
local Starbucks being less than a 2 minute walk from my hotel. One thing you can rely on is that Starbucks is consistent worldwide and a Venti English Breakfast Tea is the same color, same taste, and same great service – it just costs more. I think the Japanese diet agreed with me also. We had great fish and saved energy by not cooking it. It is also very easy to use the ATM’s, funny how getting your money from the bank to spend is so easy.