Siemens Automation Summit 2007, Part 2

My last post missed some important Automation Summit topics: catching up on KÀ, first-time fieldbus experience, PROFINET overview, and the PROFIBUS in the Process Industry class.

Jim Tomlinson followed up last year’s presentation (at the Summit and the PTO General Assembly Meeting) with an update.  I’ve blogged about this before here and here.  This year Jim reviewed his PROFIBUS and PROFIsafe architecture then showed the problems he is diagnosing by easily adding instrumentation to the bus to get the data he needs.

I conducted a PROFINET Overview/Tutorial in the first breakout time slot.  We ran out of room and some people were turned away.  The material from this session will form the basis for our PROFINET webinar.  If you missed the breakout session in person, you can catch the webinar here.

On “Day Zero” we conducted a PROFIBUS in the Process Industry one-day training event.  We heard some very complimentary comments about this class by those who sat in.  This class (and its relatives) is making the rounds of North America; we hope to see you at one.

I did not get to as many user presentations as I would have liked.  If this one that I did get to was any example, this was really my loss because this one was excellent: “A Case Study of the First Time Installation of a PROFIBUS System.”  This was a pharma application that produces about 2 liters per year – yes, per year.  There were a lot of good suggestions here.  One was to take the Certified Network Engineer Class – they didn’t and felt the learning curve was a little steeper because they did not.  (Class schedule.)   One important lesson:  Don’t discount the learning curve.  The most important question was “Would you do it again?”  They would.  They paid for the learning curve on the first project.  All of the savings expected from using a fieldbus were there on the second project.