Mycontrolroom.com Blog

I just got back from a very busy trip to Texas and Louisiana, both were very hot!  It is good to get back to Arizona for some nice dry heat. 

I meet up with a young, old friend in Shreveport, LA and had a good time as we checked out a new job.  We had a nice steak dinner the night before the meeting catching up on old times and talking guitars all night.  Doesn’t Chris look great in a florescent orange smock?

This has been a very busy month working hard on PHMSA Solutions for the Pipeline Industry.  Our work with ISO 11064 Ergonomic Design of Control Rooms is perfect for addressing the CRM regulations and the API RP 1168 Pipe Line Control Room Management CRM.

Doug Rothenberg and I have been working on a new audit methodology and individual solutions to help our customers meet compliance with the regulation.

We have solid solutions for the HMI requirements using my High Performance HMI approach, that meets exceeds all the requirements under API RP 1165 Recommended practice for Pipeline SCADA Displays and Doug’s extensive knowledge of Alarm Management EEMUA191 and the API RP 1167 Pipeline Alarm Management recommended practices.

We are also working on a detailed workshop together Jack Pankoff of Production Excellence, Inc. please watch for further information.  It will be a very comprehensive and practical workshop.

This last month has been an opportunity to update some additional operator work loadings for customers. With a new focus on operator workload in the PHMSA rule – Monitor the content and volume of controller activities [controller loading] to ensure that they have sufficient time to analyze and react to incoming alarms annually but not exceeding 15 months.

We are receiving a lot of enquiries about control rooms again, especially in the Energy sector.  We seem to have a constant flow, I guess one day we will have upgraded them all and then it will be time to start again.  Well, that is what consultants wish for. LOL

I have a busy travel schedule coming up; I will be in San Francisco in the Bay Area, then San Diego and Houston.  After this the real travel starts I will be back in Norway for a week and then going straight to Jakarta. To think I have friends who complain about travelling 40 miles to work, they should try my commute!

After getting some good feedback from customers we renewed our BBB status, we wondered if anyone would even notice or care.  Feedback tells us that several thousand customers checked out our status with BBB and over 250 requested reliability reports about us.  As long as our customers see value in us participating with the program, we will continue to participate.  We have an A+ status and as all of customers are aware we strive for excellence and continuous improvement.

We would be delighted to hear from you, give us some feedback and let us know what you would like us to tell you about.  Next month, I will provide some more details on my Norway trip, I will be giving the keynote address at a big Alarm Management Conference and all the attendees will be invited to visit the Borregaard new central control room we designed and hear firsthand from the customer about the revolutionary work that has been done to take this Pulp & Paper Mill into a bright new and profitable future.

Can it possibly be July already?  Oh how the time goes by.  I guess when you travel time flies.  Well, we always have time to stop and wish the USA Happy Birthday as we celebrate Independence.

I like to ask in my very British accent “What are we celebrating?” and I am amazed at how many Americans do not know their real history.  Those who know it was about separation from England often think it was about money and material things.  Americans are taught that “taxation without representation” was the reason America separated from Great Britain; yet “taxation without representation” was only reason number seventeen out of the twenty-seven reasons given in the Declaration of Independence – it was not even in the top half, yet it’s all that most ever hear.

Never mentioned today are the numerous grievances condemning judicial activism – or those addressing moral or religious or other issues.  American leaders long understood this Biblical truth.  For example, Thomas Jefferson noted: “History, by apprising them [students] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future.” And what can be learned by being “apprised of the past”? Go to WallBuilders to read more   about the historical distortion at http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=100

Knowing your history is one of my core values.  I will soon be sending out a notice informing my customers that this year we are celebrating 10 years as a company and that we are still aligned after many changes to our mission and vision.  The UCDS vision is to implement Best Practice solutions for reducing the frequency and severity of abnormal situations, which will dramatically improve the nature of operations in production facilities. These Best Practices impact all aspects of plant operation and will result in improved plant performance, a reduction in incidents, and improved safety and profitability.

I have had a fairly quiet month allowing me to get 3 days a week at Physical Therapy as my shoulder heals from surgery.  I have taken one trip to Salt Lake City to visit a couple of customers who are interested in operator workload assessment which is a big deal this year with many new and existing customers.

As part of our initiative with Jack Pankoff and Production Excellence, Inc. (which is a Process Industry management consulting and executive development company), we provide industry Executives and Plant Managers with a systems approach to transforming their plant organization and improving the capability of their workforce.

The Production Centered Excellence Strategy™ is a process plant manufacturing management concept based on the philosophy that a process plant is in business to do one thing, and one thing only… produce a product.  Embedded in the philosophy are several key principles.

Five Key Philosophical Principles:
Safe production is the key mission of the plant.
The plant’s organizations, work processes, and job duties must be defined and support production.
All employees, regardless of their department and function are stakeholders in production.
All improvement initiatives must support Production Centered Excellence continuous improvement (Kaizen).
Excellence is not a destination; it is a journey of “continuous improvement”.

This month Jack released the first process industry report Improving and Sustaining Organization and Workforce Capability – A Systems Approach for Your Plant to Thrive in Any Economic Climate and it features one of our great deliverables Manpower Profile System which is a system that helps customers determine if the number of employees in each job position are adequate to perform normal operations and respond to abnormal situations.

Jack and I will be delivering on-site workshops as well as the usual public ones; however, many of my customers are taking advantage of this very effective service and understand how their shift team needs to be realigned and continuously improved to maximize organization and workforce capability. So often we witness our customers struggling with problems because they have historic workload that has not adapted with plant changes, we see some jobs overloaded to the point that human error is a close friend, while they have many positions that are really under loaded to the point of being boring and under stimulated that can also cause human error.

I have also seen an increase for requests for proposals to help customers who are transitioning their DCS or SCADA systems and need to consider major changes to their alarm management and HMI systems. Our book the High performance HMI Handbook is opening their eyes to a new way of creating good situation awareness and really impacting the performance of operators, bringing the big picture back into control rooms.

As you may have seen in our Upcoming Events section this month, ISA have awarded me with a Fellow status which is a great honor and I want to thank my sponsors who approached me separately last year for nomination:  Paul Gruhn, Nick Sands and Donald Dunn and the other ISA Fellows who reviewed my application.  I will be getting my award at the ISA dinner in October so that is something to look forward to.

As these holidays end we anticipate getting busy, I have several speaking engagements planned for the next couple of months and will be letting you know about them next month.

I always like to hear from our customers, even if we are not currently working on their projects.  It is good to keep in touch and to share ideas; I am thankful to you folks out there who do that.  We never charge for offering comments or advice or just staying in touch!  Please let me know if you would be interested in receiving some more free webinars?

This past month has been very challenging for me with my shoulder recovering from rotator cuff surgery.  I managed to fly to Switzerland, Zurich and get a train to Neu Chattel or in English Newcastle.  I was doing a study for a new control room.  The visit went very well apart from needing help getting into and out of my FRC’ – try it sometime with your arm in a sling!

The journey home started well, I left the hotel at 6.00 am on Friday expecting to be home on Friday evening at 6.30pm.  When I tried to do an on-line check-in, I received a message saying discrepancy please call this 1800 number and that is the last thing you want to hear at 9:30 pm when you want an early night.  I called US Airways only to be told I had seats but no ticket!  I am used to a ticket without a seat but not visa-versa.  After over an hour on the phone the agent told me when they changed my flights on the outward journey they had not changed the tickets correctly and I would have to take my original flights which were cancelled by the agent in the USA the night before I travelled.

After several long discussions I had to explain that I now could not get to Zurich in time for that flight as I was getting the first train in the morning which would miss the connection by 2 hours!  After upgrading to a Supervisor and explaining they had changed my flights not me, she attempted to fix problem, after 2 hours on the phone she told me it was complicated and was taking some time and suggested I went to bed turn up at the airport and she would have everything fixed by the time I arrived.

So, I confidently went to bed and the following morning I got a train and arrived on time at Zurich airport, still a bit worried I thought I wouldn’t stop for breakfast even though I had 2 hours until my flight.  I thought just in case I would go straight to check-in.  Well things soon fell apart and my flight had mechanical problems and did not make it to Zurich on-time and I would not miss my connections in the States so they had rebooked me in coach on another flight!  With my arm in a sling and a big pad, both I and the agent realized I would need 2 seats in coach to make this work and they had overbooked the flight as usual.

So now the Supervisor sent me to a local hotel for the night in Zurich to get the flight the following day and she made me new connections.  Well the first flight was on-time, a good start to the day’s travels, and the only open flight they could get me on was the night flight which would mean a 7 hour delay in Philadelphia, only to find my next flight was delayed another 2 hours so I got home at 2.00 am Sunday morning.  Who said, travel was romantic and exciting?

Well I made a good start on my reports and I did get them out early so that was positive!

Dave has been busy doing reports and an updated staffing study for one of our existing customers. This seems very popular this year, and I must consider a maintenance program!  Dave also started new employment elsewhere this month, good luck to you Dave.  Dave will be doing some staffing models this next month for a new customer also.

Well it seems the economy is starting to turn after a hard year for all of us. I am grateful to those customers that kept us busy during the hardest recession and we welcomed a lot of existing customers back.

I have decided to take a more active role in the leadership of UCDS and have worked a new initiative with CCE Interiors and taken the company back.  We will continue to be working with CCE in the future and I want to thank Ward Hayworth and the other folks at CCE for all their help and support over the last 3 years especially Angela Farley who has been a great resource and kept me out trouble.

What does this mean to our customers?  No real physical changes except that we will be operating under a new tax id number and bank account.  We will continue to offer the same range of services but we may expand more in to the controls side of the business which is a core competence for us. I  am grateful for the support of some  of my previous clients who have now retired and want to work some part-time hours back in the industry like Harlan Graf who previous was refinery site manager for ConocoPhillips at the Rodeo Refinery. With the support and experience like Harlan who has been intimately involved in many central control room projects, we can offer our customers more than just an engineering solution, we can bring operations insight and many years of plant experience on every job we do.

This last few weeks I have sent out over a dozen proposals to customers, so we have to be prepared for the change in pace as the economy recovers.  We are now laying the foundation to take on that challenge.  I am excited to have people who, like myself, have a passion for this industry and not just doing a job but doing the very best we can to make sure our customers succeed and we reduce human error and improve operations performance.  Anyone can design a control room, and they do, but not many people can design a control room for good situation awareness in a cost effective manner.

I just received an invitation to do a keynote address for a conference in Norway.  A customer we just completed a massive new job for with a new Centralized Control Room will be presenting a couple of papers and taking the group back to show off their new control room which is outstanding and will serve them well for many years to come.

I am also grateful to our technical team led by Jason who behind the scenes moves, updates and optimizes our website and blog, and make it transparent to you our readers.  To Melinda who has been managing the UCDS office and keeping the accounting under control even during the recent birth of twin girls, good job Mel.

Keep watching and reading and see what is new with UCDS as we prepare for the next chapter in our lives.

After an exciting 6 weeks on the road, I have returned tired and ready for some rest.  This last month Dave and I have been extremely busy.  It appears that Operator Workload is very popular at the moment and we have been doing a lot of new jobs and updating some existing customer studies as they have been adding new equipment to meet new Environmental challenges.

It is extremely important to balance workload across operators.  Too often we find 1 or 2 operator’s with extreme workloads well above Pacesetter and many below Industrial Standard.  Why?  Well, this often comes down to department mentality and lack of organizational planning, falling into traditional old organization mentalities.

We have been able to help many organizations better understand operator workload both for console and field operators.  Our methodology is without bias and is factual based on equipment, inter-connectivity of plant units and reflects the workload associated with the control tasks.  It highlights the additional work enforced by poor alarm management, it factually demonstrates the number of manual operator moves which should have been made by the control system.  We represent these against International KPI’s.

Our methodologies can better align organizations and highlight gaps in Supervision or work-team design.  See our website for briefing notes on this topic and some of the technical papers available, especially, “Don’t be thrown for a loop” article.

I have launched 2 major High Performance HMI initiatives one for the Pipeline Industry in Houston another for a Power Company in Alabama.  I must say I was very impressed with the operators in Alabama as they understand High Performance HMI better than many Control Engineers do.  They are doing a fantastic job and I wish them all the best as they transform their business.

I had the joy of spending some time this month in St. Croix which is always a pleasure.  We have been working on an update to a refineries console operator workload as they add new equipment.  I am delighted our model which was developed over 3 years ago is a major benefit as the refinery grows and changes with time.  Some of the original people we worked with have retired or moved on but new people are taking advantage of the initial investment the refinery made and are now receiving benefits from that past work.

This month I am indebted to Dave for taking the brunt of the workload for UCDS.  I am having shoulder surgery on May 13th and will be house bound for a few weeks as my Rotor Cuff heals.  Too many bags been thrown in and out of airplane lockers in the 3 Million Miles I have flown since moving to the States. Poor Dave, his feet will not touch the ground as he is working on multiple contracts in Multiple States.  I am hoping to catch up with him at the end of the month in Ohio for a customer visit.

UCDS announced a joint partnership with EnerSys and Doug Rothenberg to provide a complete solution to cover all areas of the PHMSA/CRM.  The partnership provides a one stop shop for a complete Pipeline Solution for control system, alarm management, High Performance HMI and SCADA Controls and Ergonomically Designed Control Meeting ISO 11064 Standards and the new Human Factor requirements including Fatigue Countermeasures, Staffing Analysis for workload and Management of Organizational Change.

We will be kicking-off our first solution in Houston next week and we will build a state of the art SCADA solution set for High Performance HMI that will allow customers to comply with the new standards.  The solution will come with Philosophy, Style Guide, Object Library and the solution set which will speed up projects and improve operator performance.

Last month, I gave the keynote address at the Curvaceous TAP conference user’s forum and was delighted to hear how many customers are using that unique software to not only address alarm management but to better understand process stewardship and identifying how to always make the best product and remove variability in production.  Dave was a speaker at the NPRA Phoenix Symposium on why we need to change the way we create HMI’s and why the DCS must change.

I will be returning to St. Croix soon and look forward to catching up with some old friends on the Island.  Dave has to stay home and work on other projects this time.  I will be keeping the airlines busy this month.  Dave and I also had a pleasant drive between Atlanta and Birmingham last week to spend some time with a client.

With today’s hard economy, customers are turning to UCDS Inc. for solutions to address workload and Management of Organizational Change as the industry embraces the challenges of the world economy.  It is not all bad.  We often find that most companies have the right number of people but not all doing the right things.  Some are overloaded and many under-loaded and doing boring tasks. We can enhance their jobs and provide a safer and more pleasant work environment for employees.

Our whole focus over the last few years has been eliminating Abnormal Situations and improving operator performance.  Our services are all focused on these two main items, but the payback for customers is great.  Our solutions are improving productivity, increasing reliability, and removing variability, hence, improving quality.  With many capital projects being put on long-term hold, many companies are looking at how they can reduce their fixed costs and we have proven techniques that take the risk out of investment.

I am currently offering a 10% NPRA special discount on HMI workshops and Style Guide and advice on how to build today’s schematics that will be compliant with International Standards and the proposed ISA SP 101 HMI Lifecycle.  Both Dave and I have been enjoying the process of developing this standard and working with other knowledgeable leaders in the industry under the leadership of our good friend Maurice Wilkins.

We are starting to see more regulations and guidelines in the design of control rooms and operator console furniture.  We are creating more workshops and providing early guidance at the beginning of projects to help project leaders understand the issues and the implications of an OSHA Ergonomic Standard that could potentially impact budgets and in some cases make customers redo poor designs.

UCDS has an extensive experience in automation and control and we will make our experience available to customers to cover a broader range of services.  We have experience in material handling, robotics, AGV, weighing and labeling systems and batch control.  We have a project manager available for immediate contract, with extensive refining experience as an operations manager.

We look forward to working with you, helping you reduce costs; improve safety and environmental impacts as we make your business successful.  Our charter is to improve plant operations and achieve excellence while addressing the needs of the users, your operators.  We have always shown sensitivity to their requirements and making their jobs better, safer and more enjoyable.

What should you do when faced with two proposals one from an architect that says he does ergonomics and one from an architect who has a partnership with Human Factors provider? Obviously price will be a compelling factor; however, project costs and life cycle costs may show a very big difference.

Most companies today are aware of many of the issues!  These include bad lighting, poor people traffic flow within and around the control room, bad room adjacencies, poor console adjacencies, poor ergonomic design of consoles, missed rooms, rooms wrongly sized?

In fact, these are just some of the common issues; the real problems that may not be obvious but cause many of today’s operations problems and have led to far too many accidents are not identified in the common list above.

Some of the problems have been identified in catastrophic accidents, like the Shell Stanlow disaster, and are recorded as technical failures.  Vital process information, in this case reactor pressure, was not displayed on the VDU the operators were using at the time.  Had this been available they would have been able to detect an abnormal rise in pressure sooner and possibly in time to take corrective action.  Control Room Design: human factors.

Or the Texaco Pembroke Disaster, or the Esso Longford disaster, these alone should have taught us some lessons in control room design.  But as my old friend Trevor Kletz has written and talked about for so long, “Why Accidents Keep Happening” and “Computer Control and Human Error”.  So we keep having problems and along come BP Texas City with similar issues and another major catastrophic accident.

If we are to design out these issues we as an industry can’t keep going to unqualified people to do our designs, to people who have never heard of these incidents and don’t understand what caused and how to prevent these issues.

All of these accidents had one common problem, poor situation awareness.  So, how do we design for good situation awareness?  The answer is quite simple; utilize experienced engineers who have the background in control room operations, alarm management, HMI design, ergonomic design and layout of consoles.  If the designer cannot provide you with a detailed explanation and plan for implementing the International Standards ISO 11064 Ergonomic Design of Control Rooms they have no right doing the design.

We currently have a regulator that is uneducated, understaffed and ignorant of best practices, and even GEP in this field.  Even if the regulator did have a clue they have no power to turn the tide.  OSHA has had an Ergonomic Standard in Draft form for over a decade and can’t get it passed the legislature.  In fairness to them they have issued situations against the draft standard, but that is not very often.  To look to Government as to how and what to do is not going to solve these problems.

Our trade associations are too politically correct to call a spade a spade and insist on calling it a safe shovel.  The result is an industry that is continuing to spend over $20 Billion Dollars on Abnormal Situations and losing Billions on lost opportunity and performance improvement.

The sad fact is it does not cost anymore to do the job right in the first place!  We so often get called in to correct badly designed control rooms which have a life of over 40 years in our industry and the poor folks that are having to cope with these sad designs are suffering from all sorts of stress, health problems, fatigue and are designed to set up  operators to fail.

I was pleased to see the Pipeline Industry actually start addressing these issues through the PHMSA initiative.  Well done DOT!  We will be announcing a new partnership to address this opportunity.  Check back soon in our announcements section.

As far as work is concerned, Dave has been busy on High Performance HMI designs and looking at refinery staffing to help an existing customer update their model for operator workload based on some new equipment and organizational changes.

I have been working on a lot of new business opportunities and I travelled with Dave to one of our customer sites in St. Croix, a place we love to go to, a great customer with some great opportunities, nice weather and a nice place to visit.

We have two speaking engagements this month, we will be at NPRA presenting a paper on “Why Operators Keep Failing and the DCS must Change”.  I will also be the Keynote Speaker at the Curvaceous Software TAP customer forum on the 25th March.