Walt Boyes' Blog

Yes, there are some. Sadly, they are still few and far between. There are good signs though. At last week's ARC conference on interoperability SAP was the 5000 pound gorilla. The SAP folks were all over, announcing that they had standardized on WBF's B2MML and S88 and S95 for the language of plant to enterprise interoperability. It is about time, frankly. SAP and its … [Read more...] about MES implementations that actually work

  I'm going to go camping this weekend, and if you're like me you may want to bring a book or two along wherever you are going. For professional reading, I'm bringing Safety Instrumented Systems Verification by Bill Goble and Harry Cheddie, available from www.isa.org. I am also bringing Practical Process Control for Engineers and Technicians by Wolfgang Altman, available … [Read more...] about Suggested summer reading– on and off topic

Ron Monday said yesterday that the big thing he was having trouble explaining is that the xCoupler is an appliance, not a software system. It is like a hardware router or firewall, not a server. People keep saying, "It can't be that simple." But it is. This brings me to another thought I've had increasingly. I think that sometimes we overengineer the bejayzus out of things. For … [Read more...] about It's an APPLIANCE!

Sam Herb at Foxboro sent me the following from Eric Byres, because of my copying of a quote from him relayed to us by Honeywell. "Unfortunately it seems like editorial licence distorting my quote - what we actually said was "Of the five systems we have tested so far, this is the first we haven't disabled". We have never tested any Foxboro products - before we test anything we … [Read more...] about Eric Byres cries "Foul!"– sort of

I've been blogging rather raggedly for the last week or so, mainly because I've been trying to get the July issue of CONTROL to the printer. Not having a managing editor right now (thank you, Siemens, for pirating my excellent managing editor, Steve Kuehn) it has been just loads of fun. The issue is off to the press now, and I can catch up on stuff. I stopped blogging last week … [Read more...] about Catchin' up