Wednesday 1 April 2009

Equipment Modules or Control Modules, which are cheaper?

I heard a good one today. I had emailed the State Based Control paper to a customer asking why parts of their plant model did not have Equipment Modules, perhaps on the lines of those in the SBC paper. I got a very good answer, part of which was that all the operational aspects in those areas are manual SOP guided. And that maybe some procedural control will be added when they understand better how to run the equipment.

But another aspect was that they get charged more for more equipment modules.

Now, I have been looking into the complexity of systems, and hence the time it should take to program them. And part of the point of using Em's is to reduce complexity.
So I suggested that as they do not have to run phases ( just like those in the SBC paper) call them Control Modules!