Hello All, Just got back from teaching in S. Korea the MESA Global Education Program's MES/MOM Methodology Program. This class had 22 YOUNG engineers in the class. Most were between 28 and 32. Most were end users and system integrators. All were seriously studying the MOM standards (ISA-88/95/99/100, SCOR, OAGIS, OPC) to understand how to architect scalable industrial IT architectures. All were applying the best practices in Korea and China plants to create more jobs for their countries by building the next-generation plants. This is a premeditated, pragmatic approach and business model.

In April's Control: Remote Access Goes Mainstream. Find out why it's one of the fastest-growing and accepted technologies to hit the process control industries; plus, how an upstate New York brewer saves $230,000 a year with a flow controls upgrade; what's new in SCADA; and the story of Southern States Chemical's new sulphuric acid plant, built with a combination of recycled equipment and the latest in processing technology. Also, don't miss this month's Control Talk, featuring Greg McMillan and Stan Weiner's column "New Paradigms for Lab Control Systems."

Many (most)corporate IT folks are talking about the cloud and business process management (BPM) as the next savior for manufacturing companies. But most enterprise vendors, system integrators (SIs) and IT end users have not recognized the critical requirement that BPM must have a semantic manufacturing information model to aggregate plant-side master data and instance data from Level 2 (SCADA to Level 3 (MOM) to Level 4 (ERP and SC) and back.

Hello, all, I am still getting going on this blog, so I'm a month late with this one. But I wanted to mention this.  From February 6-9, I attended the ARC Forum in Orlando. It was the best conference of any kind in eight years. Over 600 people, more end users than others. The best presentations that I have ever seen at an ARC Event--and I have been critical in the past. Nice job. The end users were spending money.  Vendors were showing new technologies. Operations workflow products. OPC UA products.

Control's March issue is all about road maps. Our cover story "The Control Room of the Future - Smarter Reality" shows readers how to navigate through all the glitz and shiny new tools and applications to get to the best, most practical and functional 21st-century control room for their needs. Then we explore the latest navigational report from those on the search for the asset management Holy Grail of integrated production and maintenance, plus a close-up of how GlaxoSmithKline moved along the path via smart, documenting calibrators. Also, this month's Control Talk, featuring Greg McMillan and Stan Weiner, is entitled, "Going with the Flow." Read it now.

Good Day All,
I am teaching the MES/MOM Methodology Certificate of Competency (CoC) Program as part of the MESA Global Education Program (GEP):

To date, many corporate IT and business people have never recognized the critical requirement that business process management (BPM) and especially operations process management (OPM) for real-time work process sequencing must have a semantic manufacturing data model to aggregate master data and instance data from level 2 to 3 to 4 and back. IBM has actually come out and stated that their BPM, enterprise asset management, data warehouse and BI implementations have failed without a manufactuuring information model at the integration level to rationalize and structure data definition.

Hello All, I am back to actively driving the discussion in this blog.  I have been riding the waves of the global economic crisis by working and teaching all over the world over the last 3 years.  The net of this time was a lot of hard work.  As the Chair of the ISA-95 Best Practices Book and Contributing Chief Editor of, When Worlds Collide in Manufacturing Operations: ISA-95 Best Practices Book 2.0, I was awarded in October the "Thomas G.

From our sometime Hitchhiker blogger, Charlie Gifford:

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