John Halajko, of FMC, wrote me an interesting note. He reminded me that "job-sharing" might be an interesting experience as you get old...."One other thing that I did not mention is what I found in the assignment supporting the Astaris/Agrium PPA I Plant. Here we used licensed electricians to preform software build and maintain. In said project we trained the plant commissioning team consisting of four Agrium licensed electricians, their supervisor and myself in the one week Fisher Delta V implementation course. The resulting automation projects in support of a capacity increase and the Purified Phosphoric Acid Plant were developed using the engineering contractor and the Fisher Rep. Knowledgeable engineers made the bulk (say 80%) of the of the Delta V module templates reinforcing the course materials with the commissioning team. Said team completed the remaining module templates, instanced P&ID implementation, graphics and the sequential automation.
"What I learned, start with good people, provide them the proper training and resources and voila, out comes good automation," he said.
I agreed, and I got to thinking about FMC...so I wrote him back.
"In my talk, I wrote, "I neglected to mention that one of the places my father landed after leaving Honeywell was at the old Food Machinery Corporation in San Jose. He was an industrial engineering manager there for about five years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and we lived about five blocks from the Crummey family home (they owned, or he was CEO, I forget which) and I learned to play tennis in their back yard. Funny little interconnected world."
