Product category:
Maintenance Services
News Release from: SPECIAL REPORT by the Editor | Subject: Experienced engineers
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 09 November 2007
Finding experienced freelance process
engineers
A new way of locating process industry engineers with specialist expertise, who have been redeployed, retired early, or just worked for companies that went bust!
The story featured as a recent Special Report on Processingtalk was from David Spitzer, discussing whether our current technology needs experienced engineers (Ref 1) on new process plants, all the clever diagnostic systems and intelligent sensors that re-range themselves mean that poorly specified systems can almost self-heal
So does a (new) process plant need any engineers on site? If there is an engineer on site, is it better that he is from the old school, who understands the plant equipment from having stood next to it, worked with it, and seen the faults that develop: or from the new school, who understands the diagnostic messages transmitted over the fieldbus into the IT system? De-manning pressures and "outsourcing" will probably mean that the responsible engineer of the future has to manage the maintenance orders created by the diagnostics and decide where to find the skills from relevant sub-contractors, to outsource the work, and when to do it.
David goes on to tell the apocryphal story about a plant that spends 6 months trying to sort its problems out, and then recalls their (now retired) old plant engineer, who tells them the problem after a morning's walk around the plant.
Modern plants run so effectively, and self-diagnose most problems so efficiently, using the distilled experience of career engineers embedded in the software, that when they do develop a fault that "Falls outside the diagnostics rules", it is unlikely that even an experienced engineer on site will find the answer.
This is why there are so many specialist service companies now emerging - collections of expertise that cover the world.
Because they are such specialists, they are expensive: well they would have to be, if they only get two jobs each year.
There are also lots of people with valuable expertise on offer, who possibly have retired early, because they have been unable to find direct use for their skills.
Maybe its the service engineer from the centrifuge manufacturer, or the installation engineering manager from a water industry contractor, its someone who has met the problems face to face in a specialist area.
How do you find the expertise, when it might be difficult to define the problem on a Google search, and the experts maybe would have difficulty presenting this expertise, to be seen by Google? Luckily we have flexible information sources like Processingtalk, which more and more are providing the link to such sources of specialist expertise.
This exists in some large organisations: like CNES, the Corus condition monitoring specialists primarily for large plant (Ref 2); or AV Technology, experts on vibration and facilities monitoring (Ref 3); or Tube Tech International for plant or heat exchanger cleaning (Ref 4).
But the experts are also in hundreds of smaller firms, maybe built round the specialist expertise of one or two people, maybe like TEVA on cement industry fan balancing (Ref 5), or Hansford Sensors on wireless vibration monitors (Ref 6).
For all those who have expertise to offer, who maybe have not set up their own company, Processingtalk has a new subject category, to try to link people with the expertise to people seeking it, (Ref 7) see http://www.processingtalk.com/indexes/categorybrowseew.html, plus a company listing, called Expertise Available, for engineers with skills available, to list their expertise, plus contact info as well (Ref 8).
Almost, but not quite, a recruitment contact list.
Ref 1: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/stz/stz115.html .
Ref 2: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/cml/cml000.html .
Ref 3: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/avt/avt000.html .
Ref 4: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/tue/tue000.html .
Ref 5: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/teu/teu000.html .
Ref 6: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/hap/hap000.html .
Ref 7: http://www.processingtalk.com/indexes/categorybrowseew.html .
Ref 8: http://www.processingtalk.com/news/exi/exi100.html .
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