SA Instrumentation and Control contributing editor, Andrew Ashton, has started working on the annual Scada Review feature that will be published in next month’s issue. The questionnaire has been sent to all the scada vendors out there and we are once again looking forward to publishing the feature that gives South African control professionals the opportunity to read objective opinions from vendors and system integrators, as well as the end users. We will be sticking to the format of last year, which proved popular with its extra detail about the SI’s and project application statistics.
In the introduction to last year’s review we commented that changes in the global economic climate were probably the reason that the reviews were no longer dominated by projects in the mining and minerals processing industries. In fact, we had a nice mix of responses about projects in the automotive, cement, electric cable and oil and gas sectors.
We also voiced our opinion about the importance of evaluating the total cost of ownership of a solution. To recap, we believe that the initial purchase price, while obviously important, should not be the only determining factor in the procurement process. As a minimum, the initial cost, configuration costs and maintenance costs of IT infrastructure and scada need to be evaluated over the expected life of the system. It will be interesting to see if there has been a shift in end user perspective on the matter.
Since last year’s review, arguably the biggest news stories about scada have related to issues of security. As the shop and the top floor networks converge into a single enterprise wide entity, the process control layer has become more exposed to the threat of ‘infection’. Couple this with the exponential increase in the sophistication of hacker tools and the issue of enterprise wide network security down to the PLC level suddenly becomes a major concern. SA Instrumentation and Control will be reporting on the subject in a separate series of articles, but expect it to have a higher level of prominence in the questionnaire when Scada Review 2012 comes around.
Michael Brown goes online
We have some exciting news from our other contributing editor as well. In line with the trend towards content online, Mike Brown has agreed that as from now his popular series of Control Loop articles may be hosted on the SAI&C website. They will reside in the existing e-category ‘Control Systems Design’.
After 20 years spent honing his skills in the field as well as in the classroom, Mike is a fountain of knowledge on the subject with an unbridled enthusiasm for teaching. Outspoken in his frustration at the lack of understanding for the subject in industry, he believes that while the control equipment is becoming more sophisticated the base layers are not working any better and that, in many cases, the operators are running the plants not the control systems.
Mike, your articles have already made a contribution by spreading the word in print. Now that they are going online and will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, let us hope that the benefit of your experience will have an even bigger impact in a changing economy that is going to demand ever higher levels of efficiency.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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