Articles by Kevin Parker

“I love all of it, to tell you the truth. Stainless just catches the eye,” said Craig Bell Jr., a representative with Alloy Products Corp. of Waukesha, Wis. That’s the kind of feeling for the utility and beauty of the materials sciences that was on location at Interphex, held in New York City’s Jacob Javits Center.

About 70% of maintenance personnel have at least some mobile access to maintenance data, according to a just-released survey of more than 200 executives in industrial companies. But only a minority is doing work in enterprise software from a mobile device.

Software suppliers have spent the last 20 years modeling — in various codes, arcane and otherwise — the doings of the water and process industries, including for the business enterprise and for operations, engineering and maintenance.

Where does an operations manager in a mid-sized industrial enterprise turn when water-treatment bills sky-rocket? Because make no doubt about it, that’s what they're doing.

In the last 12 years, says a recently published survey,“water rates have at least doubled in more than a quarter of the locations and even tripled in a few.” Continuing rate increases are expected of 5% to 15% every few years.

For most process-industry professionals, the upstream oil and gas industry is a horse of a different color.

SCADA hit the front pages about two years ago when it came out that the Stuxnet virus had attacked Iranian centrifuges for processing nuclear materials.

SCADA systems are today the most common means for establishing computer-based production monitoring and control. While the SCADA security challenge is widely recognized, just how bad it is can be hard to say, since, for most companies, little is to be gained by talking publicly about the problem.It took only 18 hours to find the first signs of attack on one of the honeypots.

Are water markets around the world getting serious about conservation and reuse?