January 2010
We start the New Year with great anticipation for 2010. We hope the poor economy is behind us and we look forward to working with our customers and friends this year.
After the holidays, we started the year with a company meeting in Miami at one of the resorts. Our logo for the meeting was 2010: Beyond Global Recession and in true form we had a Hook-N-Cook. We had one group go fishing for supper while others enjoyed a free day at the resort.
It is not often the whole company gets together and shares our success and challenges, but what a great start to the year. We are very encouraged and feel very confident we have a great solution set for our customers.
We are innovative and keep coming up with new ideas, improving our services and products and are excited about some new ideas we will be sharing with our customers this year.
We talked about:
Business sectors and new markets
Control Room Design
High Performance HMI
Alarm Management
Staffing and workload assessments, the impact of control loops and alarm overload.
Group dinner at the resort was really good. After a hard day of presentations, everyone enjoyed the relaxing time together and ability to share a few jokes and have a few laughs. We have a really good sales team that is committed to the company and each other.
Well, not sure how the resort thing went down but we landed a great supper. Dave was the hero who caught the biggest fish and the smallest fish in one catch. I think he had some Chemical Engineer tricks associated with the bate that landed him that monster.
We both have a busy month ahead of us. We will be in Hartford, Connecticut visiting a customer who we are helping with a new Transmission and Control Center. The building is now well on its way and we will be completing the High Performance HMI Style Guide and re-designing the Distribution wall into grey-scale graphic format. We have already completed the Philosophy documents, so we are making good progress.
On the 26th of January, I will be in Texas A&M and will be presenting the keynote address. You can download a copy from our website or click here. I am grateful for the opportunity to kick the meeting off and share some new thoughts around the integration of the Safety & Automation System within a common operator interface.
In 2009, world travels took me to some great places, good customers and 150,000 miles with my favorite airline. I am looking forward to what this year will bring?
We will be participating with Jack Pankoff (Production Excellence, Inc) in his new workshop “A System Approach for your Plant to Thrive in any Economic Climate” on April 7 -9th in Denver, Colorado. Click here for more information.