ISA Hamilton was pleased to partner with ISA Montreal Section to provide a free technical webinar on Feb 18, 2021. Entitled “Want to be a hero? Know how to justify an optimization project”, the webinar featured Michel Ruel, Eng., is a Process Control Engineer based in Montreal, Quebec with over 40 years of experience as a consultant and training instructor.
Over 30 ISA members from both ISA Hamilton and ISA Montreal attended the 1 hour long webinar, held at 4pm on Thursday Feb 18, 2021.
Michel Ruel, Eng., is a Process Control Engineer with over 40 years of experience as a consultant and training instructor. He is a Fellow member of ISA, member of ISA Mentor Program and cochair of ISA 5.9 committee (Controller Algorithms and Performance). He is the author of many books and publications as well as a software designer for instrumentation and process control. He has also taught at several colleges and universities.
Mr. Ruel is the founding President of Top Control Inc. He has worked in numerous countries and is a regular lecturer for several associations. He began his career at Paper Crabtree, QC. Mr. Ruel has developed extensive expertise in process control and control performance monitoring. He has dedicated his career to working with his team to apply unique and efficient control strategies in industries including pulp and paper, mining and metals, aeronautics, energy, and petrochemicals.
From the webinar description:
It is generally accepted that the health of process control, including PID loops and advanced control like model predictive control (MPC), fuzzy logic control (FLC) and other expert systems has a direct impact on a plant performance and profitability. This is why a typical control optimization project will lead to quick benefits with minimal investment. In an era of worldwide uncertainties, some plants are struggling to meet increasing demand while other needs to maximize their efficiency to maintain benefits as demand decline. No matter what is your challenge, optimizing process control is one of the key to success. If you are concerned with such thing as energy usage, product quality and variability, better throughput and faster start-ups, then control optimization is for you.
But saying so is not enough. The required effort needs to be assessed. The performance gain needs to be demonstrated and a plan should be made so everyone from operation to management can be onboard. Have you ever thought about how to do this so key stakeholders in your plant can be instantly convinced? This can be a tough and long journey, but attend this presentation to be well prepared and make it a joyride!
Attendees gained a better understanding on how to:
- Identify the benefits that can be obtain from process optimization;
- Understand how to present and explain the benefits to key stakeholders;
- Convince management about the importance of optimization;
- Identify KPI’s to demonstrate the benefits during and after an optimization project;
- Be a hero.