For over 30 years I have been involved in the automation industry in a variety of aspects beginning with pneumatic controls to Business Enterprise Manufacturing Transactions (scary huh?).  I sometimes wonder how things became so complicated.  I remember, like it was yesterday, rebuilding a pneumatic safety relay that we used to open an oil & gas well while working for Chevron on an offshore production facility.  At that time, this simplistic form of automation resulted in immediate value.  My well produced oil & gas legally (bypassing the safety system was an option) my boss didn’t get yelled at and I was able to keep my job. This marked the beginning of my automation career; that is right after I learned how  to paint handrails, which I still don’t understand how this relates to automation.  Whatever!  Dues Paid.

A short time later we really thought that we were the automation czars.  We managed to send a signal via a 300 baud SCADA system  to shutdown our 24” natural gas pipeline to retain production as long as possible before a hurricane.  This also depicts a simple, value added automation project that protected the environment and helped Chevron make extra bucks.  This is so different from today, where thousands of data points that we capture, monitor and control from various assets using different communication protocols to create a myriad of complex algorithms that SHOULD work together to make life easier.  Please excuse the run on sentence; I am trying to make a point here!  One question; How’s that workin out for ya now?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Author's Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.