It’s April and, along with baseball, the spring conference season is gathering momentum. Here are a few opportunities in various industry and professional segments for you to get out and stretch your experiences, contacts and knowledge.
MESA International North American Conference
The MESA International North American Conference, Unlocking Your Operations Potential, is coming soon. Organizers have been working hard to assemble an outstanding program. We believe that many people have experiences and knowledge to share. If you are one of these, we have two ways for you to actively participate.
The first way is to present a formal talk, sharing your knowledge and best practices. We are accepting abstracts through Monday April 12. You’ll be in good company – and will share the conference stage with nationally-recognized keynotes and industry leading session speakers!
MESA is looking for the best, most quantifiable case studies and real world presentations on the following topics:
- Tying Operational Metrics to Financial Metrics
- Real-Time Enterprise
- Quality & Compliance
- Asset Performance Management (APM)
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
- Lean
- Sustainability
Click here to submit an abstract.
Unconference
If putting a formal presentation together isn’t your desire but you still feel like adding in your experiences or engaging speakers and other attendees in greater depth about a topic, the the Unconference program is just for you. Too many presentations can dull your senses. Sometimes you’d like to ask more questions of the speakers and there’s no time. Sometimes you see others that share your problems, and you’d like to connect with them.
Rather than hope for a chance meeting in the hallways, MESA has set aside time in the program especially for these meetings. Called an Unconference, attendees can suggest topics they’d like to discuss in more detail. People will self-select into one of these sessions that are led by the attendees themselves with the help of a MESA facilitator. These are all the rage in Silicon Valley. MESA is bringing the concept to manufacturing and production executives.
If you’d like to submit a topic for an Unconference session, please send an email to [email protected] or [email protected].
The conference is June 21-23 at the Ford Conference and Event Center in Dearborn, MI.
WBF, The Organization for Production Technology
WBF, the Organization for Production Technology, will gather its North American Make-2-Profit Conference, May 24-26, at the University of Texas at Austin.
This conference is focused on manufacturers, system providers and integrators, and suppliers who are interested in learning methods of achieving operations strength in this economic environment. Conference topics will include not only batch process control, but continuous and discrete manufacturing areas that also benefit from the application of standards.
Dozens of speakers will gather to share operational and implementation procedural control strategies that benefit end users (manufacturers) to increase profit, quality, and efficiency. Building on the success of previous WBF conferences, this year’s Make-2-Profit conference also discusses how procedural control standards S88 and S95 have recently been implemented at companies such as Pfizer, Lubrizol, Shire Pharmaceuticals, and Dow Chemical. Pre-conference tutorials on Make2Pack and B2MML will also be offered.
Keynote speakers include Dr. Thomas Edgar, expert on process monitoring, modeling, and optimization and the chair of the Chemical Engineering Department at University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Patrick Kennedy, CEO of OSIsoft, a software company focused on connecting people with the right information, at the right time, to analyze, collaborate and act.
The conference, sponsored by OSIsoft, Yokogawa and Honeywell, will include a vendor showcase where equipment and software suppliers and system integrators can share their messages and products with a group of end users eager for knowledge.
Maintenance and Reliability
I’ll be on vacation and not attending this year’s edition. I have spoken a couple of times at this conference and found it to foster a great interchange of ideas and informationon this important manufacturing topic.
MARTS 2010 Conferences are held April 28-29 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel in Rosemont, IL. Included are 32 one-hour presentations in six categories over two days. Three to four are offered each Conference period, so whether you drill deep into a single category or cover a variety.
Here are some sample topics:
- How to Make Your CMMS Interoperate With the Real-Time Enterprise
- How to Reduce the Payback Period For Energy Efficiency Projects
- Benchmark Your Lube Program Through Oil Analysis
- Classical RCM: Try It, You Are Bound to Like It
- How to Make Your TPM Implementation a Total Success
- Plant Floor Reliability: A Four Senses Approach
- Where’s Your Reliability Policy?
- 5 Guaranteed Ways to Cut Costs While Shooting Your Maintenance Effort in the Foot
- Change Behavior to Achieve Results: High Impact Learning
- Reliability and Maintenance Management: From Good to Great
- Using Web 2.0 Technologies and Social Media to Continuously
- Improve Maintenance and Reliability
- Understanding Torque Measurements and Torsional Analysis
- Infrared Thermography: What’s Hot in PdM
- Applying Disruptive Learning Techniques in a Manufacturing Environment
- The Right Part at the Right Time at Cost-Effective Prices
NASA scientist to keynote CSIA’s “Aim Higher” Conference
Control System Integrators Association (CSIA) announced that NASA scientist Kalmanje KrishnaKumar is the keynote speaker at the association’s 2010 Executive Conference in Seattle. KrishnaKumar will present “Intelligent Control Systems: Shaping the Future of Aeronautics and Space Exploration,” at 8:30 a.m., Friday, April 30.
Intelligent control systems are nature-inspired, computationally intensive problem-solving tools and methodologies that have become important for future innovations in aeronautics and space exploration. Intelligent control systems will enable safe, mission-effective approaches to aircraft and spacecraft design and control, spacecraft autonomy, and robotic and human space exploration. In the keynote address, KrishnaKumar will present some areas of applications of intelligent control that NASA is pursuing and highlight the benefits in such applications.
Dr. KrishnaKumar is a scientist and past group lead of the Adaptive Control and Evolvable Systems (ACES) group of the Exploration Technology Directorate at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. He currently serves as the principal investigator for the Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control project under the NASA Aviation Safety Program.
The CSIA 2010 Executive Conference will be April 29 – May 1 at the Westin Seattle.
