UCDS has had an interesting month, which included our tradition of spending Thanksgiving in Sedona, for good food, relaxation and visiting nature. A few hikes in the Sedona country side which is very beautiful and good for the soul.
We had a few firsts in November. We introduced our High Performance HMI ladder assessment gap analysis on a refinery project in Houston. It provided a very constructive methodology to review the HMI and collect data as to the many design flaws and shortcomings of the installed graphics. It also provided a prioritized list of improvements, while capturing good practices or unique and useful design ideas incorporated in the existing design.
We conducted a Management of Organizational Change for a refinery in the process of moving their control rooms into a single centralized control room. They had the usual concerns regarding loss of face to face contact between the field operators and the process control console operators, and the Chief or Lead operators and the console operator’s. We always recommend that management do not just dismiss their concerns but understand them and mitigate these concerns as much as possible. They are real concerns and can impact the team working of the operators.
I always recommend learning from the successful implementation of remote operation centers, like the ones in the North Sea that have successfully moved their control rooms on-shore. They have exploited video conferencing and one of my favorite technologies “Smart Boards” used to help operators collaborate in real-time. The benefit of operators being able to share the same document in real-time in two different locations together with video conferencing is extremely valuable.
It is interesting operators always raise concerns about potential worst case scenarios and the loss of that face to face contact but during review of these scenarios we always discover that the console operator is abandoned for many important activities in the field and that moving the console operator into a centralized control room can improve team working and provide a more suitable environment for dealing with a very stressful situation.
We also went back to an old customer in Salt Lake City; they implemented a control room move from a very hazardous area to an area within the administration building. This is a very common move these days. The new control room was very nice but they had made some fundamental mistakes during construction and had not addressed issues regarding acoustics. Many customers take a Conceptual Design from us and try to save money by not investing in the Detail Design and nearly always they end up reworking and trying to fix design problems which can be very costly.
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We also completed a staffing update as they were interested in further consolidations and bringing some of the units that were harder to bring into the control room. These units often are manned by a single operator who manages both the console and the field work. What we refer to as an inside/outside operator. It is quite a challenge as the operator cannot be in two places at once. We have learned over the last 50 years that having the operator part of the loop and not out of the loop doing other tasks is a better practice with computer control. Having dedicated field operators is again a best practice.
We initially did an Abnormal Situation Awareness and effective operations practices study and the company is interested in utilizing this tool on their other sites and we are preparing proposals for their next phase in moving towards best practices.
We have also completed another first for us; we completed a front-end study for a pipeline customer in Houston who is looking at compliance issues with the new DOT PHMSA Regulation.
We have developed tools to help pipeline customers with compliance and understanding of the regulation. We have a powerful alliance with EnerSys, DRoth and Production Excellence Inc. All these companies have a unique contribution to make in providing solutions for this industry together with over 200 years of experience and have specialized in elements of the regulation.
Please make a note that starting January 1, 2011 we will be selling copies of our Fatigue Awareness Booklet.
This has been an incredible month so far. I started the month in Houston at the ISA Awards where I received my Fellow award. Let me share a little of the experience with you.
Citation: In recognition of visionary development of Abnormal Situation Management.
Ian Nimmo is President of User Centered Design Services Inc. and founder of the Abnormal Situation Management Consortium which focuses on bringing knowledge of the industry’s best practices in areas such as alarm management, operator training, procedural operations, and control room environment to its customers. His lustrous career in the automation industry has resulted in methodologies used around the world for which he has received numerous awards. Nimmo became a member of ISA in 1991.
This was a great honor. I am grateful to Paul Gruhn for being my sponsor and to Nick Sands of DuPont and Donald Dunn of Aramco for also nominating me.
The award night was made special by having so many good friends to share this moment with. I am grateful to Doug Rothenberg who provided friendship and support to me.
It was a special night and a chance to celebrate with the other Fellows at a special luncheon and also at the banquet. My congratulations to the other honorees, it is a pleasure to share this experience with you:
Randy K. Buchanan, Ph.D.
Aerospace Industries and Test Measurement Divisions
The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA
Citation: In recognition of leadership in the design and development of space hardware processing and automated planetary and space emulation.
About: Dr. Buchanan is an Associate Professor and Assistant Director at the University of Southern Mississippi and is well known for many engineering and scientific innovations employed by NASA for which he has received several awards. Dr. Buchanan has authored numerous scientific publications, and recently was awarded a U. S. patent in automation. Dr. Buchanan became a member of ISA in 1993 and is also a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the American Institute of Physics and Society of Physics Students.
George Shu-Xing Cheng, Ph.D.
Northern California Section
CyboSoft General Cybernation Group, Inc., Rancho Cordova, California, USA
Citation: In recognition of the invention, development, and deployment of Model-Free Adaptive (MFA) control technology.
John P. Gerry, PE
Unaffiliated
ExperTune Inc., Hartland, Wisconsin, USA
Citation: In recognition of pioneering the development of Optimization, Control and Loop-Tuning Software
I spent the following day in the ISA SP101 HMI Committee discussing something near and dear to my heart, the High Performance HMI. I have a passion to ensure that industry learns the lessons from past failures and embraces the human factors known to improve operator performance in this area.
This month, a customer confirmed a new P.O. to do a gap analysis on one of their refineries units HMI’s. I have done this many times in the past, but this time I want it to be different. I have been working on a more formalized approach to conducting a gap analysis and determine what meets industrial practice and what differentiates best practices. I have developed a ladder approach with some standards based on the ASM Consortium Guidelines, SP 101’s current thoughts and EEMUA 201 Guidelines with insight from the Norwegian Standards for SAS and potential new standards being developed by Statoil.
I visited with good friends from EnerSys, who are developing (with our help) a total solution for the Pipeline PHMSA Regulation. We reviewed the new HMI they have developed for SCADA based on High Performance HMI principles, which is impressive and is going to make an impact in this arena. We discussed a new initiative we have, developing the conformance policy statement for customers. We are very excited about this new opportunity and intend to provide CRM conformance, High Performance HMI services, fatigue management, improved communications practices, Situation Awareness Workshops and upgrades to existing control rooms.
I travelled to Norway for a pleasant weekend with my two favorite Human Factor Experts, Mark & Marie Green. It is always good to visit them as Marie is one of the best cooks I know and they are always concerned with improving their business and promoting human factors. It is a great time to share ideas and discuss industrial issues. We spent a lot of time discussing the PHMSA Regulation and my ideas for doing the High Performance HMI gap analysis. I treasure their input as Mark has unique ways of structuring ideas into reality and presenting them in an easy to understand format.
I spent a day visiting one of our customers, Borregaard. They are a very unique and empowering company that is currently lifting themselves out of tradition and breaking the mold and re-creating themselves. Their pursuit of best practices is impressive; they have re-organized their organization unchanged probably since their foundation over 100 years ago to a new leaner company focused on production. We conducted Operator Workload Analysis and Management of Organizational Change for them which is a giant step going from inside/outside operators to dedicated positions with new rotation and shift changes. They also took our Work Team Design and have re-structured all of their management and supervision and are proud of the outcome. They are giving several presentations and will be found at the Honeywell European User Group this fall.
During my visit, they let me take a lot of photographs of their new control building we helped them design. It is very impressive and was opened up to 80 visitors from the ife alarm management and control room conference being held in the local town of Sarpsborg. The attendees were all impressed at Borregaard’s proud achievement. The pride they have is evidenced in the detail from Smartboards in each conference room to the tidy wiring in the computer rack room. I have not seen a rack room as professionally done.
I hope you enjoyed viewing my digital photo tour of the control room and building. Good control rooms do not just happen; they are designed by people with knowledge about the industry, about operations, and about ergonomics. UCDS has those unique skills.
I am looking forward to the next 3 weeks. I will be in Kansas for the next 2 weeks and then Houston the week after and then on to Salt Lake City for a staffing update for an old customer.
This last week I received the following email:
“You are cordially invited to be our guest of honor at the annual ISA Fellows Luncheon. The luncheon will take place on Monday, 4 October at the Westin Galleria Hotel in Houston, Texas. As a guest of honor you are entitled to a complimentary luncheon ticket for you and a guest. There is no formal program at the luncheon, however each new Fellow will be introduced and invited to briefly share with attendees what you consider your most significant professional achievement.”
Wow, what a great honor, I feel really humble; this is going to be quite a day in the life of this engineer…after the lunch, the formal dress dinner, and awards ceremony! But this invitation has made me stop in my tracks. If you know me that takes some doing!
That question “what do you consider your most significant professional achievement”, set me thinking. Past projects came flooding back to me from my early days during my time with ICI where I have to admit I had the most fun and achieved some incredible things which today may seem trivial but back then were quite something.
My very first assignment on my own had responsibility which would lead to people being disciplined. This was on a small plant in Scotland, which involved re-drawing the site (in ink) after a major fire/explosion and redoing the electrical area classification and reporting none-compliance. It was my first extended time away from home and living in a small hotel for a long period. I had to rely on company standards instead of anything I had learned at college. I had to learn to get people to work with me, get me information and manage priorities. This prepared me for my own site job.
I had a good friend and a great Engineer Larry Conner who was my mentor. We did things that others could only dream of doing. We had every technology from thermionic valves to the first germanium then silicone diodes, to the very first transistors, logic circuits, and early control computers to the very first plc’s installed in the UK. That reminds me of a funny story regarding Larry, as new technology was being introduced we saw it for the first time at work. One day a rep came into the site to tell us we could replace some of the valve technology with this new semi-conductor technology.
Larry, excited by the robust and small technology, persuaded the rep to leave a sample diode with us. Larry spent the day testing the device and could not get it to work. When the rep returned, Larry shared his disgust and inability to get the device to conduct in any direction. To his embarrassment and the rep, who had to admit that he had left Larry with a wooden demo and not the real thing as they did not have any real ones delivered at that point as the technology was so new.
I replaced an old mechanical synthetic fiber bale handling system with a futuristic system utilizing robotic Automatic Guide Vehicles instead of an operator. With a label, a weigh scale and a John Bull kit we designed an automatic bale weighing and labeling system. Way cool! We even earned a patent for it as it was revolutionary and it worked! People and companies came from miles around to see it working, even Ford Motor Company and Black & Decker were impressed. It was a great achievement and it was applied engineering at its best.
Yes, that was like building your very own train set. It was gratifying to see it work. A lot of things we do we often do not see anything physical from our efforts. We had many, many more exciting projects that I am proud of but the Bale Handling System (and some of the fun failures like my robot shrink wrapper which is described in a paper on our website – click here to view) is the one I am most proud of.
One of the most impressive times was one which came out of a very rare but scary series of incidents. What we achieved was incredible and we earned the title Engineer as a result of it. We at first seemed to be having a very, very bad period with failure after failure, way beyond normal including instrument failures, wiring faults, and plc’s losing their programs. We initially thought it was interference from trucks with large CB radios coming onto site, what else would corrupt computers memory?
It turned out we had our very own terrorist who the police eventually caught after he went too far and his final act was obviously a terrorist act. After he was caught, he congratulated me on my ability to fault find and correct his acts of terrorism. I was basically following him day by day and keeping pace with his acts from basic instrument calibration changes to disrupting or deleting software. His final act was to set a fire in a panel. He was so frustrated that we had redesigned a solution and I had drawn a new solution which included several ratio speed controls for a drawing machine, that he set the hand drawing on fire and caused a second fire which became obvious now that both fires had been intentional. This was a very dangerous act in the middle of the third biggest petrochemical complex in Europe. That was quite a time. I was on-call with my partner Larry and we both were fixing things at a rapid rate day and night. At the end of this experience I felt qualified to be an engineer and that I could tackle anything the job could throw at me.
My final ICI experience was again a failure of a computer control system. It was not the failure but how we investigated that failure which was special. ICI had developed HazOp and I had a friend Stuart Nunns who used to come to my office and we would strategize about computer incidents and we started collecting data and information. When we had the big hardware failure on the nylon plant that had a software element, we both launched into developing the very first computer HazOp study which became a very big thing. The methodology changed the way we did things and got me involved in the speaking circuit and being involved in computer safety. I started working with the UK H&SE on PES. I starred in a BBC documentary about computer failures; I had to go through media training to be interviewed on this BBC program.
This event led me to leave the UK and move to the United States, working with Honeywell as a Senior Engineering Fellow and the Program Director of the Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium. The first part was right for my experience and expertise, understanding the problem and defining what an abnormal situation is and what system we have that support normal operations and what is the missing technology and knowledge that leads to abnormal situations. What we discovered was a whole industry around human error as over 80% of incidents were identified as human error.
I worked for almost 10 years with this role then I left Honeywell and formed UCDS as a solution service company for abnormal situations, to improve operator situation awareness and reduce human error. So here I am with almost 20 years in the US working in multiple industries but providing the same service. I have focused on reducing operator error by re-designing control rooms to improve situation awareness, reduce distractions improve communications and collaboration. I have introduced ergonomically designed operator desks/consoles and also the High Performance HMI that allows Alarm Management to actually work and support operator situation awareness rather than overload and overwhelm operators.
This new career has meant getting involved in a whole new discipline of human factors and ergonomics. As well as getting involved in people issues such as work related stress and operator fatigue issues and workload assessment.
I haven’t even touched on many of the other things I have done in my career such as printed circuit board design, computer modeling and the 3 years I had with Davy Ashmore International, or the time as a Power Engineer doing protection systems, installing medium voltage transformers.
One of the questions ISA asked was who should we inform about your award, and as a small business, I could not give them a name, so I guess the readers of my blog will have to be my accountability! I want to thank all the people in my career who I have worked with…
I have to date had such a wide and varied career with so many friends and so many lessons, especially by those who did not have my best interests at heart. Something I have had to learn in business and not just engineering, which has been my hardest challenge in my career. I am grateful to people like John Moscatelli who was the best partner a small business could ask for, or a fellow consultant like David Lee who demonstrated the integrity and work ethic any employer could ever wish for. Both have been good friends and both talented in their own right, and a pleasure to work with bringing their own personality and skills to complement my own diverse background.
I have developed long-term partnerships with Jack Pankoff of Production Excellence Inc., Rob Allen of Lin & Associates, Doug Rothenberg (DRoth), Nick and Lisa to name a few. I am grateful for over 40 years working in industry and hopefully a few more the good Lord willing. For the speaking engagements I have been invited to share some of my experiences, for the book opportunities, magazine articles and great friends like Mark Rosenweig, Walt Boyes, and for the many friends at ISA who have invested time writing standards with me Nick Sands, Paul Gruhn, Donald Dunn, and Maurice Wilkins.
And for friends overseas like Angelo D’Agostino, Mark & Marie Green, Asle Davidsen, Windsor Coles. Thank you to all who have had a positive influence on my life.
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.
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