The May Technology Evening reverted to the first Wednesday of the month and was held as usual at the Durban Country Club. Kindly sponsored by Yokogawa, the topic was of significance to all who are involved in making processing plants operate optimally and with the minimum possible downtime. The topic was “ISA 106 – procedural automation for continuous process operations” and Yokogawa’s MIS/MES specialist, Jacques Rossouw, gave us the run-down on the goals of the standard, which included:
• How to improve operations in the continuous process industries by increasing the adoption of automated procedures.
• How to make procedure automation an expected part of any capital project.
Chairman Hennie Prinsloo (left) thanking Jacques after the presentation.
For interested readers, the major topics covered by the ISA 106 standard are:
• Models and terminology.
• Modularisation of procedural steps to foster re-use and lower TCO.
• Exception handling for abnormal situations.
• Physical, procedural, and application models.
• Process unit orientation with operational perspective.
• Recommended best practices.
• Implementation of start up, shutdown, abnormal situations, hold states and transition logic.
• Recommended target platform (i.e. control system vs. safety system) for different types of procedures.
• Lifecycle management best practices.
• Training and certification best practice.
Jacques is a skilled integration and solutions architect with expertise in leading and delivering medium to large-scale solutions in systems integration, infrastructure modernisation and solutions architecture. He has held leadership roles on projects in manufacturing execution systems, business intelligence and legacy systems re-engineering. He has diverse architectural design and implementation experience across multiple computing platforms and with his Masters in Engineering, Control Systems (University of Stellenbosch) and Masters in Business Administration, IT Management (GIBS) he was well qualified to lead this discussion.
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