Communication skills advance project capabilities

When it comes to being agile and nimble in the automation industry, everyone has to be able to speak the same language, said today’s keynote speaker at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit in Chicago.
To be reactive to the marketplace, you have to be able to communicate with your suppliers, said Eric Cosman, engineering solutions IT consultant for Dow Chemical Co.
“We found at Dow we had our own language and when you work closely with suppliers you have to speak the same language,” Cosman said. “When you come into a situation (with a supplier) speaking ‘Dowspeak’ then there is a problem. You have to be able to speak the same language.”
Cosman said about 10 years ago Dow decided to adopt an industry standard for language and that has helped them when dealing with people and companies outside his organization.
In short, that communication level allows a company to remain agile. “You have to move quickly in the industry,” Cosman said.
Cosman talked about a scenario where Dow and Siemens worked together on a project and one of the keys to the entire project was communication.
“Work closely with suppliers and you can feed your needs and goals back to them and they can deliver even better products,” he said. “It truly ends up being a win-win situation.”
Afterall, companies are changing all the time with all the mergers and acquisitions occurring.
“We are in the midst of a huge transformation in our business,” Cosman said. “It is a very dynamic business climate.”

Siemens sticks to plan

It is all about having a plan and sticking to it.
From “The Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic to Siemens Chief Executive for Industrial Automation Systems Industry sector, Ralf-Michael Franke, they all have a plan to move forward.
In Rancic’s case, it was about having one major goal and quite a few smaller goals to meet along the way during his run up the ladder on the first year of the television show “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump, Rancic said during his keynote address today at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit in Chicago. Rancic ended up winning and becoming Trump’s right hand man for a year.
Franke said during his keynote Siemens has a plan to make sure the company is moving forward not for the next quarter, but for the next 10 years or so in the complex automation environment.
“We cannot avoid complexity in the future,” Franke said. “We have to learn how to manage it.”
Part of that complexity is about reducing time to market. Franke sees cutting down on engineering time as a benefit to reducing time to market. After all, the faster you can get product to customers, the higher your chance of profitability.
“We have to go more and more toward the digital world and also the virtual world,” he said. “Engineers have to think this way in the future.”
Siemens also relies upon what it calls megatrends to be a guiding force for their future.
They see three megatrends as areas to focus their business: Urbanization, demographics and climate change, said Dennis Sadlowski, chief executive of Siemens Energy and Automation during his keynote this morning.
Urbanization is interesting as last year was the first year in a long time that people were moving back into cities. Their projection is by 2015, there will be 350 million people living in mega cities all over the world.
Demographics is simple. People are living longer as life expectancy has jumped to just over 80 years of age.
Climate change is also a megatrend and there is definitely a higher concentration of CO2 on Earth, Sadlowski said.
He added the company is jumping on those trends and positioning the company to help out and take advantage of the situation. “Energy is one of the hottest topics across the world today,” Sadlowski said. “There will be a 40% increase in worldwide energy demand in the next 25 years. Siemens is well positioned in the energy sector and making investments in alternative energy programs.”
“The one that is first to react to the market is the one that will make more money,” Franke said.
It’s all about having a plan.

Siemens launches traveling technology fair

Siemens launched its U.S. tour last night of an impressive traveling expo.
Just about 300 people joined at Chicago's Navy Pier for the official unveiling of exiderdome.
Siemens’ exiderdome is essentially a traveling technology expo and learning laboratory. It is built on a barge for the first part of its nine-city tour. It will ship out Friday and head for Detroit. The 10,000 square-foot, two-story building carries energy and automation technology.
"The United States is by far the largest coountry for us to do business and we have a long history in Chicago,” said Heinrich Hiesinger, chief executive of Siemens Industry Sector, which is responsible for around $50 billion in revenue.
One of the ideas behind the traveling expo is to get out and touch customers.
“We cannot serve the customers of the world by staying home,” Hiesinger said.
Exiderdome has Siemens technology on display and gives examples of how the technology works.
"We sell productivity and exiderdome tells this story,” said Dennis Sadlowski, president and chief executive of Siemens Energy & Automation. "Productivity allows our customers to link the virtual world of design and development to real world production.”
Exiderdome’s nine-city, 10-month tour of U.S. manufacturing centers this year will go to Detroit 7-15 August, Boston 20-24 October, New York 1-7 November, Charlotte 8-12 December. Next year it will go to Orlando, Denver, Los Angeles and Houston.

The skinny on dippers in a reservoir

A little story moved over the wires the other day where a man and a woman were caught skinny dipping in a Portland, Ore., reservoir. That reservoir is a main source of water for the city and officials nearly dumped millions of gallons of water and closed the facility. All because two people decided to swim with no clothes on.
The only reason why they didn’t drain the millions of gallons of water was because the two dippers were swimming in a section of the reservoir not in use at the time. Had that section been in use, water bureau officials said they would have had to dump millions of gallons of water from that pool and possibly shut off the reservoir.
Yikes.
Maybe I am a nut, but in the drought-stricken Southeast or in areas like Nevada or Arizona, I would hope water officials there would have the good sense not to even entertain the thought of dumping millions of gallons of water just because two people decided to frolic sans trunks.
While thinking about it, water gets treated at the reservoir or further downstream. You mean to say, with all the wildlife using and living in the water, officials think humans foul the water that much.
Luckily, the only thing that happened was the two now face trespassing charges. City officials didn’t waste the water and hopefully, they won’t the next time Jack and Jill decide to go for a dip.