Product category:
Web Publications and Portals
News Release from: SPECIAL REPORT by the Editor | Subject: MN
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 21 May 2007
Processingtalk in Minneapolis, Minnesota
USA
A report from Minneapolis on some of the process industry suppliers manufacturing near there, and some impressions on the development of the State, resulting from a recent visit
Workwise UK is still exhorting us to work flexibly from home, http://www.processingtalk.com/news/wow/wow105.html: and it seems inevitable that a lot of websites are run in this way: this is certainly the case with Processingtalk and Read-out.net in Ireland Eoin O'Riain of Read-out even moved his home from Dublin to Galway, over on the West of Ireland, to be able to overlook the Isle of Arran from his study window: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/rdo/rdo000.html
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 3 Aug 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
The 2004 Manufacturing Excellence Conference
In its sixth year ME has matured into a balanced event, a real process industry forum for discussion and learning about operational benefits from modern automation systems, writes Nick Denbow
After 50 years of Control Enginering
This year Control Engineering magazine in the USA celebrates its fiftieth anniversary: Michael Babb, the Editor of Control Engineering Europe, reviews what has happened over these 50 years
Probably some help was needed from the Irish Telecomms people to make the broadband reach out that far.
Moving Processingtalk from Winchester to Minneapolis for the last few weeks has not been uneventful: the laptop came, the stories were ready, but a small hiccup meant the laptop did not speak to the internet land line.
With daily deadlines to meet, to get the news through, a stroll down a Burnsville suburban road was necessary, using the laptop as a dowsing rod.
Further reading
Read-out Forum at IRCHEM in Cork
Andrew Bond, Editor of the Industrial Automation Insider, recently chaired the Read-out Forum at IRCHEM in Cork: his summary of the event is entitled: "Vendors circle the wagons as users turn nasty"
Fieldbus and its benefits
The conclusions of the ARC study are worth reviewing: "The value proposition of fieldbus has changed from the initial perceptions of the marketplace...."
'Industrial Marketing on the Internet' Seminar
Earlier this year Pro-Talk held two seminars helping explain to industrial companies how to develop their internet presence, aimed at marketing managers from industrial and scientific manufacturers
Thanks to 'Buffalo', an open access wifi system in one of my new American neighbour's houses, the Processingtalk stories were beamed away into the ether once again.
A big 'Thankyou' to Buffalo.
MINNESOTA.
What does Minnesota mean to you? Well, all I knew was that 3M started as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.
Minnesota is top dead centre of the US on the Canadian border.
The port of Duluth on Lake Superior is 2300 miles inland from the Atlantic, but is still a deep sea freighter port, shipping iron ore and grain: Duluth still handles 75% of the US iron ore supply.
The rest of the state was populated by Sioux Indians at one time, but then the water power of the Mississippi River, which starts up here and cuts the US in two North to South, attracted grist mills and flour milling to around the Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis.
Names like Pillsbury and General Mills are based here.
After WW2, Minneapolis and St Paul, the twin cities along the river, became a *Centre of Technology*: in 1946 the Engineering Research Association was set up here, which became Sperry Rand, and the people from there span out to create Control Data Corp in 1957, and then Cray Research.
This expertise spin-off means that most of the older engineering firms in Minneapolis are around 50 years old.
The people attracted to the area were immigrants, and the metropolitan area around the Twin Cities has 3M inhabitants, 39% claiming German origin and 17% Norwegian! Three typical examples follow, of Process industry suppliers that originate from that time.
THERMO FISHER SCIENTIFIC have a manufacturing plant west of Minneapolis, at Coon Rapids, for products with old established brand names, like Ramsey and Goring Kerr.
The Ramsey products are Minnesota developed, originally for the mining industry in the state, with conveyors, belt weighers, samplers and feeders now supplied worldwide to mining and power industry customers.
http://www.processingtalk.com/news/thq/thq000.html.
Goring Kerr is an old English brand of food inspection systems, metal detectors and X-ray systems for accidental contamination detection.
The original Goring Kerr X-ray inspection systems were developed in the 1970 era, and are now far more sophisticated, in around the sixth generation.
The latest systems supplied to the pharmaceutical industry are sensitive enough to detect any chips or slivers of glass within a glass phial inside the product packaging, used at the end of the packaging line.
At the opposite end of the range the low cost EZx X-ray systems are the equivalent of a metal detector, not inspecting product but just rejecting a package where foreign solid matter is detected.
http://www.processingtalk.com/news/thq/thq103.html.
These Thermo products, built in Minneapolis, but also in South Africa, China and Italy, and with a UK base in Rugby, will be on display in the UK at Total exhibition next week http://www.processingtalk.com/news/thq/thq104.html.
EMERSON ROSEMOUNT pressure and temperature transmitter products originated in Eden Prairie, just west of Minneapolis - and in fact John Berra joined Rosemount there in 1976, as an industry marketing manager! Emerson took over Rosemount in 1976 too, and the rest is history.
So maybe there is still hope for all you young marketing managers, maybe you too can make it to President one day.
The Eden Prairie location now seems to be a training facility, for plant engineers to learn about Rosemount instrumentation, and asset management systems.
Transmitter production is now further west, at a new Rosemount factory and HQ at Chanhassen, but of course there are other parallel production plants around the world.
Most of the original Rosemount DP transmitters like the 1151 would have come out of Minneapolis, and currently it is the base for a lot of the new Rosemount wireless technology: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/emn/emn100.html.
HOFFMAN: From Anoka, 30 miles north of Minneapolis, is Hoffman, a well known name in on-site enclosures: part of the same Pentair group as Schroff (obviously the 'ff' is important in the enclosures business), Hoffman also has had a manufacturing base in Wales since 1983: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/hof/hof120.html.
Currently with fires raging over 56 square miles in NE Minnesota and across the Canadian border, plus floods from the Mississippi near St Paul, Minnesota has its share of problems, but the overall impression is still of a very friendly welcome from the small percentage of the 3M (that is 3Million, not 3M!) people I have met during three weeks here.
• SPECIAL REPORT by the Editor: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Processingtalk email newsletter
• Processingtalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
