and finally, from the ABB On Tour department, heere's…

Bruce Reierson.

Bruce is the director, asset optimization business development for the process industries products group. Is it my imagination or are titles getting long and convoluted again? Well, that be as it may, we’d been sitting there for close on 2 hours now, and were getting sleepy. TWO HOURS OF POWERPOINTS!?!!!?
Jeez louise! What did I ever do to ABB to deserve this!
But I digress.
Bruce, who made us all perk up again (not that Mark Taft had put us to sleep– he hadn’t), actually knows what he’s talking about. He talked about the challenges and choices of achieving productivity. He noted that many plants have been given the mutually exclusive tasks of increasing productivity, cutting costs, remaining competitive and at the same time becoming safer places to work. Yeah, right.
The famous rule of two-out-of-three happens to play in here: “Fast, good and cheap, pick any two.”
Luckily for all their customers, ABB provides a hardware/software and a contract management solution for this problem.
We’ve already heard about the hardware/software…now the management story.
Rather than give Bruce’s powerpoint spiel, I’m just going to refer you to a link to our sister magazine, Plant Services, which covered a real world application of ABB’s contract management services in its August 2004 issue: “Sign It Away?”. The story of a forest products mill, Kinleith Mill, in Tokoroa New Zealand, is an excellent example of what ABB proposes they do for many large companies. It is an interesting story, and if you are an end user, you might find it even more interesting than if you are a vendor.