From the YEAR 2000 Newsletter:
nSPG Year 2000 Conference and Expo coverage
Dallas, October 22-24, 1997
Covered by Cliff Kurtzman, cliff.kurtzman@year2000.com
For the Year 2000 Information Center, year2000.com
I'll be covering this conference in a series of three mailings over
the next week or two. In this mailing are the following sessions:
Keynote Address: Because the future is in your hands...
Vendor & Tools Selection Strategies
Year 2000 Challenges with Petroleum Process Automation
<snip>
********** General Impressions
The conference was run in parallel tracks, so I could not
attend every session. Of those sessions I did attend, I'm
only able to briefly summarize some of the key points in the
kind of forum that this newsletter provides. This coverage
does not serve as a replacement for attending the conference,
but hopefully it will give you some flavor for the issues
being addressed by the speakers. Overall, the conference
had a fairly heavy emphasis on embedded systems and the oil
and gas industry, which is not too surprising given the
Dallas location. I estimated that there were about 300
attendees at the conference.
<snip>
********** Year 2000 Challenges with Petroleum Process Automation
This session consisted of a short introduction followed by
a question and answer session from a panel moderated by Jim
Porter, who is a partner at Coopers & Lybrand. Other
members of the panel included Phil Ihrig (pjihrig@amoco.com),
who is a Planner in the Year 2000 Program Management Office
at Amoco; Ron Quiggins, Director, Shell Services; and Lee
Stogner (l.stogner@ieee.org), who is a Principal Consultant
at Fluor Daniel. Mr. Quiggins also gave a keynote session
at the conference, which I will be covering later.
Mr. Ihrig indicated that the biggest problem faced in the
industry is process control. He estimated that in the
petroleum business, fixing IT (information technology)
applications is only 10-15% of the problem -- embedded
systems are the big issue. The first step is to conduct an
inventory to identify critical devices that need to be
tested for Year 2000 compliance. Talking to manufacturers
about their product's compliancy can be helpful, but it is
only a start. Once delivered to a plant, components are
often customized and built into systems, and this process
introduces problems that the manufacturer may not be
involved with or even aware of. It is essential but often
difficult to schedule tests around the performance of other
normal functions and operations.
Mr. Stogner indicated that there is a lot of denial within
the industry that Year 2000 is anything other than an IT
problem. But there are a lot of small instruments today
that date stamp data and process it. A big problem within
the industry is that there is a lot of equipment that has
been working fine for a long period of time and there is no
one left around who knows the details about how it works
internally. Mr. Stogner also indicated the importance of
setting up an office to manage tracking compliancy
information on components. As an example, a tire
manufacturer sent out 6,000 compliance letters to its
suppliers, but only received 3 responses. An office
needs to be responsible for following up on the responses
and non-responses.
Mr. Porter emphasized that the real complexity of the job is
not the technical solution but the task of integrating so
many systems and components. You need to understand your
vendor's timelines and how it fits with yours. If your
vendor is too late in implementing an upgrade to achieve
compliancy in their product, you may not have enough time to
install that upgrade in your plant and test it before Year
2000 arrives.
A question from the audience asked what the overall Y2K
status of the energy industry was today. Answers from the
panel indicated that the oil and gas industry was, for the
most part, in the late assessment phase and early
implementation phase. The electric utilities industry is in
the awareness and inventory stage, and for the most part not
yet into implementation. The panel felt that, overall, the
utilities industries are somewhat behind the oil and gas
industries in addressing Y2K issues.
Mr. Quiggins noted that the oil and gas industry has
identified Y2K as a "noncompetitive" issue and companies
that are otherwise competitors are working closely together
to solve their Year 2000 problems. Through a working group,
these companies share information and trade stories.
Telling senior management what their competitors are doing
is very helpful in convincing them to take action, and
everyone in the working group gains by their willingness to
share this kind of information with each other.
A question from the audience asked how much plant testing
would realistically be performed. The panel indicated that
testing in this area is a very difficult and serious problem.
Devices that are safety or operations critical will be tested.
They look at their systems from the perspective of safety,
revenue contribution, contractual obligations,
environmental/regulatory requirements, and legal
repercussions in order to prioritize their efforts.
A question from the audience asked what the various
professional organizations are doing in this area. The
panelists mentioned that the Institution of Electrical
Engineers (IEE) in the U.K. has a web site that is a great
resource for addressing embedded systems.
(See iee.org.uk. They also mentioned
high level articles in recent months from other professional
societies:
Chemical Engineering, July 1997
Year 2000 or Bust
che.com
Mechanical Engineering Magazine, September 1997
Millennial mayhem for manufacturing: Good morning, it's Jan. 1, 2000.
Will factories function today?
memagazine.org
Manufacturing Systems, September 1997
Year 2000 Special Report
manufacturingsystems.com
Several questions were asked about how best to work with
vendors to understand their compliancy status.
Most compliancy information that is available on the web
addresses IT, not embedded systems. Two plant tool
providers, Millennium UK and Tava Technologies have a Y2K
methodology built into their tools and are building vendor
compliancy databases to assist their clients.
A member of the panel suggested that it is helpful to
establish a private web site (intranet or extranet) for your
program office to give wide access to the equipment and
vendor database you collect.
It was noted that PLC vendors seem to be very forthright
about their Year 2000 compliancy problems, but Distributed
Control System (DCS) vendors are not talking about their
compliancy status, which is a big problem.
It was noted that when a vendor won't provide adequate
answers to their compliancy status or detail what the costs
will be to fix their equipment, it can be helpful to band
together with others within your industry and trade groups to
demand a response. Don't hesitate to take the issue up with
your CEO and have them get involved if that is what it takes
to get a response. It also helps to require that vendors
that want to provide bids on ongoing services also provide
compliancy information on equipment that they have supplied
in the past. Vendor compliance letters also help you
establish your legal standing and demonstrate due diligence
on the part of your organization.
Finally, it was noted that this is not just an automation
issue -- many functions in a plant involve human operators
which may need training to deal with changes in their
displays and interfaces. |
