Our Executive Officer is a go. After more than a year of meetings, negotiations and debates, your Council has approved the appointment of an Executive Officer. By the time you read this, hopefully we will also have identified the most suitable candidate.
The Executive Officer's tasks will cover a broad spectrum of SAIMC activities including the administration of recruitment and membership; maintaining and communicating with existing branches, enabling the establishment of new branches and sub-branches as well as oversee presentations and awards. The officer will also be responsible for promoting the Institute as a credible and respected body through adding value and communication with all members, patrons, industry publications and other institutes such as IMC (UK), IIAC (Australia), ISA (USA), SAIEE and SACAC. Our involvement with the various industry exhibitions will also fall under the officer's jurisdiction, providing us with a single contact point for all matters relating to exhibitions, stand build up, attendance and fund collections. The communication process will also involve the management of our website, ensuring that it is updated continuously with new material and information that is of benefit to our branches and members as well as the international community. This is an area of particular interest and we would like to establish a 'virtual institute' that is both accessible and informative to remote members.
Education and training is another area where the Executive Officer will provide the Institute with leadership. This will involve not only the driving of our equity initiative, the promotion of a formalised training programme and participation with SAQA and the NQF but also increase our exposure with tertiary institutes in an effort to promote both the SAIMC and the measurement and control industry as a whole.
Electrex is looking electric
Electrex 2000 draws nearer and the SAIMC has been intimately involved with TML Reed to ensure that the exhibition is both beneficial and memorable to visitors and exhibitors alike. Should you not yet have taken advantage of the transport arrangements such as the special buses from Rustenburg, Welkom, Secunda etc, or the subsidised travel packages from major centres of Cape Town, Durban and Richards Bay, contact Tracey Williams at TML Reed on (011) 886 3734.
Fieldbus. Great technology but no consensus
As anticipated, there is still no single fieldbus standard that has been adopted by major supporters. There is no doubt that the enthusiasm Foundation Fieldbus is gaining momentum against Profibus, the master/slave philosophy of over two million nodes installed worldwide. This is not only in process industries such as chemical and petrochemical, but also where the philosophy was the classical DCS topology since Foundation Fieldbus also decentralises the processing power by putting a PID in every instrument, reducing the costs and creating greater flexibility.
The two philosophies will continue since each one is more suitable to certain applications than the other. However, in time the gurus will develop interfaces that will allows Profibus devices to communicate with Foundation Fieldbus devices and vice versa.
To further compound the fieldbus confusion, we have to recognise digital I/O such as proximity switches, contactors, level switches etc (which are either on/off, open/closed) which need simpler but faster communication protocols and will continue to be separate buses eg Interbus S and AS-i.
Like computer operating systems, there will never be one fieldbus that will address all the demands of industry. Rather, there will exist a combination of buses capable of co-existing and complementing each other.
Industry on the acquisition trail
Our industry is currently undergoing an acceleration in the number of mergers and acquisitions. For example, Siemens recently acquired Moor Products Corp, Milltronics and Turbo-Werk Messtechnik while Endress+Hauser bought ISI and Staiger Mohilo Analysen, not to mention the activities of ABB, Honeywell and Invensys.
It seems there is an ongoing rationalisation in the industry and for the moment that bigger is better. We can hope that process measurement ingenuity is not going to stifled since, at the moment, there appears to be an almost unlimited number of new ways of controlling and measuring processes, eg noncontact temperature measurement, optical level measurement, chemical action-free pH probes and more.
All in all, 2000 looks to be a year of excitement.
John Immelman
(011) 444 1386
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