November’s Mining, Manufacturing & Process conference (MMP), hosted by Technews and co-hosted by ARC Advisory Group broke new ground in terms of conferences for enterprise automation and IT in South Africa.
Carrying the tag line 'Winning strategies and best practices in enterprise automation and IT in mining, manufacturing and process', organiser Technews went to great lengths to ensure that the presentations were vendor-neutral and that adequate time was available for Q&A, panel discussion sessions and delegate interaction.
The consequence of this was that the conference was granted CPD (continuing professional development) validation under the ECSA banner. This meant that attending professional engineers were able to record 2 CPD points for their involvement in the conference.
The two-day event comprised some common sessions and some sessions where there were parallel streams – one more focused on manufacturing and process and the other more focused on mining and mineral processing.
For organiser Technews, the driving goal was to ensure that delegates were able to take away new knowledge to inform their strategic thinking and best practices, helping to ensure that South African mining, manufacturing and process business remain healthy and competitive during this current economic downturn.
Informative keynote addresses
To provide a sound foundation for the conference presenter, Technews invited keynote speakers Dick Hill, VP and GM for manufacturing: ARC Advisory Group and Jim Pinto, independent analyst, angel investor and futurist.
Hill challenged delegates to think about whether Moore’s law is still applicable and to factor into their strategic thinking the relative values of proprietary standards, de facto standards and global standards.
Pinto reminded delegates of the importance of deriving knowledge from information. He emphasised that there are only three sources of wealth:
* Natural resources, which are location dependent.
* Plentiful, low cost labour, which benefit is reduced by automation.
* Knowledge: the key source of advantage.
His message emphasised the strategic importance of knowledge and of protecting that intellectual property through messages such as:
* 'Cheaper, better, faster = wealth'.
* 'Knowledge should be incorporated in the software so that systems become
self-adaptive'.
Recurring themes
The interesting thing for me was the recurring themes that came across through diverse presentations.
Relationships and engineering – IT convergence
High on this list was the fact that although we work in technology our problems and opportunities lie in the area of interpersonal and inter-organisational communications. It brought to mind a psychological assessment from many years ago which read, 'Andrew will work better with things than with people'. The harsh truth seems to be that we cannot succeed in technology unless we succeed in working with people. Engineering and IT must work together to maximise the potential of available technologies. Collaboration is all-important. Those organisations that get this right gain an insurmountable lead vs. those who fail.
Standards
Both the keynote addresses and many of the other presenters stressed the importance and economic benefits of adopting standards. Mike Ramsay from APV spoke about the benefits that their organisation has achieved by choosing to globally work to an ISA S88 model. This allows engineering and process expertise to talk the same language and for the company to ship out automation code modules to low cost destinations like India – knowing that the resulting code can be supported and understood by APV engineers from Argentina and Australia to Venezuela and Vietnam.
Lifecycle costs and TCO
Many of the presenters touched on the twin themes of lifecycle costs and total cost of ownership (TCO) vs. total cost of acquisition. Producing at low cost is ultimately about adopting a long-term TCO approach; not buying at least cost (TCA).
Compliance
Another recurrent theme was the increasing impact of the need for organisations to comply with regulatory requirements.
In each of these themes is the echo of Jim Pinto saying, 'The knowledge must be incorporated in the software'.
Conference wrap up
At the end of day two of the conference Darren Smith, Technews MD, summarised the proceedings. Smith spoke about the rapid changes that are taking place in terms of the movement of software away from our desktops and onto the Web and the impact of Wikis, blogs, podcasts and social media and online collaboration.
Engineers have been brought up to value structure and yet many tools today are exploiting, rather than changing this lack of structure.
To help illustrate the need for strategic thinkers to question preconceptions and to look more closely at aggregated data Smith played a TED video of Hans Rosling.
To view the video visit http://twurl.nl/hq8r8p
Meeting delegates expectations
In making the decision to host MMP Technews kept one guiding principle: Delegates must be able to leave MMP with a real take-away, having learnt something of value that they can immediately apply in their organisations to inform their strategic thinking and/or the application of best practices.
An analysis of delegate questionnaires revealed that MMP met these goals:
* More than 95% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: 'My knowledge of the subject was increased'.
* More than 86% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: 'I can apply what I have learnt in my work'.
* More than 90% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: 'The presenters used real world examples'.
Conference proceedings
The papers published in the following pages were provided by the respective presenters to add value for delegates of MMP and readers of Technews publications. Space prevents us from printing the complete content of each paper. We have therefore provided an edited introduction and an online link to the full paper.
Readers who were unable to attend MMP can purchase the conference CD for R999 excl VAT by sending an e-mail with their name and contact phone number to [email protected]. The contents comprise selected papers, all presentation slide decks, conference images, related whitepapers, research and product publications.
For more information contact Andrew Ashton, Technews, +27 (0)11 886 3640, [email protected], www.technews.co.za
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