Productivity Perspectives

About the 1^st of December Processing magazine will announce the winners of its annual Breakthrough Products awards. It is the first time this editor has had the pleasure of working on them.   

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act and perhaps the most remarkable thing is that not very many people had too much bad to say about it.

The world of television commercials is chock full of integrated enterprises, but not so ours.

The parent company of process equipment suppliers K-Tron and Rotex, Hillenbrand, Inc., has agreed to acquire Stuttgart, Germany-based Coperion Capital GmbH, a provider of compounding and bulk materials handling systems, for an estimated purchase price of $530 million. 

“Innovation,” as a management concept, was recently found by somebody or other to be, at the moment, the most over-used buzzword of them all. But you probably know that already, having been subjected to a steady stream of innovation rhetoric through B-to-B media or other venues. (Some amongst us will even remember the quality craze of the 1990s.)

When this editor joined the Processing franchise about six months ago he was convinced that one key to success of a business trade magazine was focus: that the circulation, editorial content and advertising base should be a coherent whole.  And, based on a fair amount of training and experience, he still believes that today.

When a production plant looks to install a process-control system, specifying the computer workstations is one of the first jobs done. Besides eventually being used by operators to manage production, the workstations initially are the platform for process development, fitting the software template to the specific application. Sizeable projects, even then, can run 18 months or more prior to process certification.

How process-control automaton has transformed the industrial world over the last 30 years – although widely recognized – remains a great untold story. While almost everyone is familiar with the handful of individuals who envisioned the PC, dozens of near equally important advances have been accomplished by highly talented, near-anonymous individuals.

Some years ago, not long after joining my first B2B magazine editorial staff, the guy in the cubicle next to mine was a trained journalist. Most everyone else on that magazine was a chemical engineer by background.

While the global economic environment today is one characterized by great uncertainty, the outlook for the U.S. chemical industry is said to be considerably less sanguine.