Yokogawa SBU（面向解决方案的软件包）用户大会在东京召开

By Shigeo Kuroiwa, ARC Advisory Group

Yokogawa Electric hosted its 4th SBP (Solution Base Package) users meeting on February 2, 2006 in Tokyo, which was attended by about 160 professionals from 60 end users companies in Japan. Yokogawa is also supporting the virtual user meeting on Internet, where user members exchange information and opinions at anytime and anywhere.

In opening the meeting, Mr. Shuzo Kaihori, Director of Yokogawa, summarized that the first SBP users meeting was held in 2003 with only 39 attendees from 27 companies and it has been expanded year-by-year, so that it now stands as a valuable user community where users discuss their case stories and exchange ideas and experiences each other.

Exapilot from Yokogawa, one of the leading solution packages that played the key role in meeting discussions, won the Technology Award from SICE (Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers) in 2005, and it has been installed at over 500 installations.

The main theme of this user meeting was on advanced operation support systems, and six case stories were presented by users (Mitsubishi Rayon-Otake, Showa Denko-Oita, Nippon Zeon-Tokuyama, Mitsubishi Chemical-Kurosaki, Asahi Carbon-Niigata, and Nihonkai Oil-Toyama).

In the user case stories session, speakers discussed their own experiences in Improvements of Control Performance, Stabilization of Operation, Alarm Management, Deployment of Advanced Control, and so on. On these topics, most users have similar experiences and challenges to be addressed. Therefore, Q&A discussions between speakers and audience were lively. Many practical topics were discussed, such as how to maintain the highest operations skills and to relay technical excellence through generations, when operators are rapidly aging and retiring; how to handle analyzers data in control; scope of automation; project roles sharing between instrumentation engineers and operators; management from commissioning phase to process improvement phase; and so on. Discussions were very useful to user attendees who enjoyed sharing practical information each other.

These presentations were followed by an exciting panel session, titled "Issues in Today's Process Operation - How to address Operation Support in Near Future", which was moderated by Professor Gofuku of Okayama University.

ARC believes this kind of user activity in promoting the sharing of practical information is a great help for achieving real Operational Excellence.