Posts Categorized: News

A colleague was telling me about her recent rise in work commitments. She was saying that, even though she is normally a well organized person, the ability to manage her schedule over the next few weeks would be much more difficult than normal, but at the same time it was much more critical than normal…. Read more »

Last month we spoke about how the oil spill in the US Gulf of Mexico will mean the laws will change. This month we are going to talk about how court rulings (not new laws, but interpretations of existing laws) will impact us. And that is by tort. What is a “tort”? We like this… Read more »

On July 10, 1976, the engineering world changed. There was an industrial incident in Seveso, Italy, when dioxin (the chemical that causes chlorache, and can be lethal in small quantities) was released by accident. About 600 people were evacuated from their homes, and about 2000 people were treated for dioxin exposure. That was the day… Read more »

One of the more high profile bad management decisions is playing out as I write this … a professional rugby league team here in Australia has been found to have systematically abused and violated the league’s salary cap rules for the past 5 years. During that time, they won 2 premierships. The fallout has been… Read more »

Years ago I learned about the concept of “industrial ecology”. In involves industrial facilities constructively working together with neighbouring industrial facilities to better manage local resources and issues. Not only does it make good economic sense, it makes good community, social, and environmental sense. And it is very applicable today – just like it was… Read more »

I was speaking with a friend that is a project manager, and he was telling me about a new project to install a new air compressor / dryer / receiver system for an existing facility. The new air system would provide air for recently completed and planned organic growth. And I was amazed at the… Read more »

While the obvious answer is … if the project KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are met, then the job is done well, is this answer good enough? The global financial crisis was brought on in part by organisations meeting their KPIs. So it is clear to me that the KPI approach in isolation is not adequate,… Read more »

I am sure everyone is familiar with the concept of the triple bottom line (economic success, ecological succes, social responsibility success), so I will not elaborate on the three components. As I write this, the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen has completed, with an outcome that many would call disappointing. One possible reason for… Read more »

The information in this article is entirely anecdotal. I recently delivered two unrelated training courses in the United Arab Emirates. One was a public course. There were 12 delegates from 4 companies (and maybe more importantly, 4 countries). The other was an in-house course. There were 13 delegates, and because it was an in-house course,… Read more »

Recently, we delivered a training course on IEC 61508 and 61511 (the two standards that form the basis for many safety instrumented systems in the process industries). The course was developed by another company, and it does a good job of showing how other “things” supplement safety instrumented systems. One of the best examples from… Read more »