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Posted On: 09/22/2005

Fall conferences focus on reliability

PlantServices.com

A look at the programs for this year’s fall meetings shows high interest in the role of industrial maintenance, reliability and asset management for improving plant performance. One expects maintenance-focused events like SmartSignal’s Summit 2005 (Sept. 12-14, Chicago, www.smartsignal.com), PdM-2005 (Sept. 19-22, Atlanta, www.maintenanceconference.com), InfraMation (Oct. 17-21, Las Vegas, www.inframation.org) and, of course, the SMRP Annual Conference (Oct. 23-26, St. Louis, www.smrp.org) to focus on responsible asset care.

But this year, the agendas of traditionally less maintenance-focused events like the Invensys/Avantis and Emerson user group meetings, ISA Expo 2005, Automation Fair 2005 and the Chem Show are putting plenty of emphasis on MRO. Even if you resist temptation and reserve your show attendance schedule for the hard-core plant maintenance venues, you can expect the process, automation and control engineers and managers who attend these events to come back with a positive perspective on the importance of your job.

The 2005 Emerson Global Users Exchange (Oct. 3-7, Orlando, www.emersonexchange.org) is devoting about 60 of its more than 300 workshops and short courses to asset reliability and optimization. Topics range from justifying a predictive maintenance program and technologies through implementing asset management to interpreting and applying reliability metrics.

The theme of this year’s Invensys event is “Get More From One,” intended to communicate the extra value of combining Foxboro process control, Triconex safety and critical control, SimSci-Esscor simulation and optimization, and Avantis reliability and asset management tools. Alongside product update, tutorial and case history presentations, the Invensys/Avantis user group meeting (Oct. 3-5, Houston, www.invensys.com/usergroup2005) offers sessions such as The Cost of Unpredicted Downtime, Developing a Maintenance Strategy and Realizing Value From Condition Monitoring, as well as a series of panel discussions “titled Maintenance Reliability.”

ISA Expo (Oct. 25-27, Chicago, www.isa.org/isaexpo2005) is devoting one of its eight technical conference tracks to Productivity and Asset Management. Sessions include Reaping the Rewards of Strategic Maintenance, Prediction-based Diagnostics, Economics of Asset Management and Saving Energy through Advanced Automation.

The Chem Show (Nov. 1-3, New York, www.chemshow.com) interrupts its virtually all-process-engineering, all-the-time conference to allocate the longest time slot on its schedule -– four hours -– to a session titled “Turning Maintenance Into a Profit Center.”

Automation Fair 2005 hosted by Rockwell Automation (Nov. 16-17, St. Louis, www.automationfair.com) says its attendees will have the opportunity to improve product time-to-market, increase profitability, develop asset management and optimization strategies, and manage manufacturing business risk through 21 hands-on labs, more than 50 technical sessions and a show floor featuring 89 partner-company booths, 16 Rockwell Automation exhibits, and presentations by seven university programs. The event’s 50-plus technical sessions are grouped into 14 areas including case study, control design, data management, intelligent motor control, maintenance, management, networks, power control, process control, RFID, security, standards and wireless networking.