Report from the End User Seminar in Calgary

Two weeks ago on May 23rd we held our first of three 2012 North American end user seminars in Calgary at the Telus Convention Center.  In my opinion it was one of our best seminars to date, with around 120 registered attendees.  This was more than we got last year and even better was the fact that just about everybody stayed until the end of the day.  We did a lot of hands on demonstration of FOUNDATION technology that followed the phases of the plant lifecycle, from engineering and design to installation, commissioning, operations, and maintenance.  It seemed clear to those of us that planned the seminar that many may lack a clear understanding of the lifecycle benefits of FOUNDATION fieldbus, and this will be the theme for all of our seminars this year.

Lots of Interest in the Sponsor Booths at the Calgary Seminar

Dave Lancaster of Trine University (one of our Fieldbus Certified Training Program partners) gave an excellent overview of key considerations in the engineering and design phase.  He also covered installation and commissioning and gave a demonstration of our DesignMate segment design tool, which is a free download from the Fieldbus Foundation web site.  John Rezabek of Ashland Chemical and chairman of our End User Advisory Council (EUAC) gave an excellent presentation on installation and commissioning as well, taking some of the complexity and mystery out of what it takes to do a good fieldbus installation from a physical layer perspective.  Amit Ajmeri of Yokogawa then demonstrated installation and commissioning of FOUNDATION fieldbus devices on the Yokogawa host system demonstration unit.

Ray Azizian of Yokogawa Explains the Yokogawa Demo Unit to an End  User

The operational benefits of the seminar consisted of a very good presentation by John Rezabek on the importance of the FOUNDATION fieldbus user layer and block structure, and how you can use control in the field to realize some significant operational benefits such as single loop integrity and avoidance of unplanned shutdowns.  Control in the field capability was effectively demonstrated by Charlie Piper of Invensys Operations Management on that company's host demonstration unit.

Charlie Piper from Invensys Operations Management Answers
Questions about Control in the Field

The last portion of the day included Chuck Carter of Lee College's (also an FCTP partner) presentation on managing diagnostic data from devices, which was also given by John Rezabek.  Al Dewey of Emerson Process Management then provided an in depth presentation on device diagnostics using the Emerson host demonstration system.  Last but not least was Ed Williamson's presentation on the importance of training.  Ed is one of the chief fieldbus instructors at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, which is another of our Fieldbus Certified Training Program Partners.  We rounded out the day with a very good panel discussion.  I hope the rest of the seminars in North America this year go as well as the Calgary seminar did.  Thanks to all who made it possible.  We would also like to thank our other sponsors, including MooreHawke, Westlock Controls, Cobalt Process, Endress+Hauser, MTL/Cooper, Pepperl+Fuchs, Phoenix Contact, Stahl, and Rockwell Automation.

The Emerson Diagnostic Unit that Simulates Plugged Impulse Lines,
among Other Things