Generally considered to be South Africa's premier automation and control event, the Siemens Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) User Forum drew to a close on 24 October 2007 at the Birchwood Conference Centre having broken all previous attendance records and for the first time, witnessed a shared first place in the annual Cyber Junkyard competition.
Des Burrows of host Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D), said the 560 delegates represent an all-time record for attendance at the three-day event. The gala dinner for the Siemens A&D Partner Awards and the Cyber Junkyard winners drew around 700 partners, end-users and staff.
"From a Siemens perspective, we are very happy with the attendance at both the technical sessions, exhibitions and training seminars," says Burrows. "The technical content was excellent and covered almost every subject related to automation and drives, and the entertainment provided by Nick Mallett was not only topical but highly popular too as we got the low-down on the Boks straight from the horse's mouth."
Centred on the theme 'Improving Efficiency. Increasing Productivity', Burrows says the conference featured keynote addresses, informative talks, presentations, case studies, breakaway sessions, solutions-orientated exhibitions and training sessions in industrial automation.
"The TIA User Forum offered system integrators and end-users a perfect opportunity to get up to date on advances and innovations that have taken place over the past year," he says. "Customers also got a good idea of where we are going and what we are doing to support the products in the year ahead. This kind of knowledge puts them in a position to make the right decisions in terms of applications, which product route to take and where the support lies."
Burrows says a popular drawcard this year was the Siemens Automation Innovation Tour, an international travelling exhibition that incorporated a working model of a factory to demonstrate how the Totally Integrated Automation concept is rolled out using Profinet.
"From the customer's perspective, it proved to be an excellent showpiece as they were able to see for themselves, first hand, TIA working together in a live environment using Siemens products," he says.
As an added bonus, delegates to the TIA User Forum were able to view and interact with students participating in the Siemens' Cyber Junkyard Challenge, the annual competition that sees various educational institutions using sponsored equipment from Siemens and others to build a solution to a specific problem.
For the first time since the competition's inception, the judges found it impossible to choose an overall winner, opting instead to award a joint first prize to the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and the University of Johannesburg, with Bloemfontein's Central University collecting the third place award.
"Rather than split the R100 000 worth of Siemens products first prize between the two winners, the sponsors decided to award each institution R100 000," concludes Burrows.
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