"Matrikon is growing," says CEO Amin Rawji, "and this is reflected in the number of countries attending this event this year. We are truly a global company."
"Our vision," he said, "is to be the key company to help you reach your operational excellence goals by helping manage all operational data. We offer a common technology infrastructure, with all of our products on this common infrastructure, with a common metadata model."
Matrikon is making changes. Product names are being changed to better reflect what the product is and what it does. For example, Process Guard is now Alarm Manager.
Dr. Dave Shook, Matrikon's Chief Technical Officer, whose favorite group is BareNakedLadies, and whose hobbies include rebuilding sports cars and blacksmithing, spoke next. "The question is," he said, "can I combine all three of those, have some BareNakedLadies in a sports car..."
"I'm going to talk about what's new."
We are in a Red Queen's Race. It takes all the running you can do to stay in place. If you want to get anywhere you need to run twice as fast. That's a great metaphor for what our situation is, in business globally. Markets are wide open, and input costs are global. Instead of competing with just two or three companies, a couple of whom are not as smart as you, you are competing globally with some very smart people in the global marketplace for all the dollars.
You are also competing in the global knowledge person market, too. Finding good people is getting harder to do, and will continue to be hard as people retire.
Our market verticals: Oil and Gas, Mining, Power, Refining and Chemicals, Pulp and Paper all have the same goals: Operational Excellence...they all have somewhat different vocabularies, but the goals are the same. They want to lower cost, raise profits, and make sure that the CEO doesn't go to jail.
Systematic management of efficiency, reliability, and HSE to achieve world-class performance: Operational Excellence.
Matrikon's background, our strength, is in the process industries. That means we can take innovations from one industry and leverage them throughout the entire group of process verticals we cover. If you are looking for advances, you should speak to people in industries other than your own, because some of them are further ahead than you are.
The first level down in Operational Excellence is about filling the supply chain, "goo in a pipe." We call that Production Management. Then there is Asset Effectiveness: the amount you get out of your fixed assets. It is also about the people who run the processes: Operational Optimization.
The problem is that excellence is the consequence of continuous attention to detail and stamina. Mediocrity is easy, excellence is hard.
One of the things that make the process industries unique is that we rely on instrumentation to tell us what went where, and how. We don't actually deal with the product, so much as we deal with the information about the product. The process industries were one of the first information industries.
The operational people are the meat in the sandwich between "what we are going to do" and "what we are going to do it with."
Many companies have a balanced scorecard with a variety of KPIs: throughput, cost, compliance, safety, uptime, efficiency, etc.
In operations, there are multiple roles, departments and processes, just as at the plant floor, there are multiple applications with "multiple versions of the truth": ERP. DCS, LIMS, MES, Historian, EAM, SCADA, etc.
These roles are being squeezed even more because of the dearth of qualified people.
So these goals and objectives come cascading down from the executive suite...this year's, this quarter's, this month's, this week's, today's...etc. These cascade all the way down to the setpoints of the controllers and the tasks of the operators and maintenance workers.
Then we have all this data, whether manually entered or acquired by a DAQ system, and this data goes upward to the people who have the pieces of the goals and objectives. And the data doesn't work. The data always has discrepancies, and it takes a long time to get data you can do something with.
You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot use measurement if you can't measure quickly and easily.
The gap consists of:
- Timely access to complete reliable information about operations
- Automated transfer of data among operational systems
- self-maintaining applications
- Product names now explain what the products do
- products are organized by the spect of the operational excellence challenge they address
- enhanced and extended services offering-- particularly in alarm management
- new vertical applications built on horizontal products
- support operational exceelence goals and objectives
- drive operational intelligence
