X-CHANGE in the Drakensberg

July 2008 News

Over 340 industry professionals attended X-CHANGE 2008, Wonderware Southern Africa’s 16th annual User Group Conference, held this year at the Champagne Sports Resort. This year the focus was on manufacturing execution systems, advanced process control and enterprise evolution in the mining and manufacturing industries.

Plenary sessions

Sudipta Bhattacharya, CEO and president of Wonderware, said that one of the main reasons why Wonderware was winning market share from its competitors was because the company was deconstructing the status quo of companies modelled on a monolithic structure and was trying to cater for totally integrated value chains. According to Bhattacharya, Wonderware will remain nimble through its ability to excel in the domains it understands while partnering with other industry professionals for complementary solutions.

Dr Peter G. Martin, a speaker at this year’s event, said that CEOs and executive management are being held to a higher standard of accountability by shareholders and, with an average tenure of three years, have very little time to prove their worth. “This causes tremendous upheavals within the company. IT has been downsized drastically and engineering is a close second. Today, information technology and automation engineering are merging. However, no one is quite sure whether this will yield better results or simply a more convenient block of victims at the next downsizing pass. So, the choice is simple: either the combined organisation continues to be downsized or it converts to an organisation that can prove its contribution to added business value.”

Another keynote speaker was Yves Dufort, director, Wonderware Canada, who showed how competition is forcing manufacturers to contain costs in spite of rising energy prices.

Presentations and Expo

The core of X-CHANGE 2008 was the presentations by industry experts whose knowledge and professionalism sparked the interest of the audience. 36 sessions addressed issues such as scada and MES applications, low (hardware) and high-level (application) connectivity, the application of standards, the improvement of quality and productivity and many, many more. Additionally, 12 customer presentations showed how Wonderware applications helped to alleviate current problems and provide for the future in southern African installations.

For more information contact Justin Tweedie, Wonderware Southern Africa, 0861 WONDER, [email protected], www.wonderware.co.za

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