Charlie Gifford Is Back

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. Fisher Award of Excellence for a Standards-Based Reference Publication" as the best new standards-based book of 2011 which is presented annually by the ISA. It took 3 years to complete this work. It was a pleasure working with all of you through each paper to bring them all to a well written and reviewed form that is at least 85% correct to the current best practice.  These papers are already getting a lot of exposure and further discussion of the evolving best practice. Since 4 of the 9 courses of the content of the MESA Global Education Program are derived from Book 2.0, MESA is continuing discussion of the work group in workshop-like training with over 350 students in the last year on 5 continents.  Check it out at www.mesa.org on the Global Education tab.