News

July 2007 - Happy Birthday America!!!

Ian will be doing a webcast for Worldwide Batch Forum on July 18, 2007:

To view more click here

UCDS has been doing Control Rooms, Staffing Studies, and Alarm Management, including building alarm management monitoring systems and HMI Style Guides this month in New Orleans, Kentucky, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, so we have been extremely busy. John has just completed his final study for a while as he takes on a new adventure. He will be working for Sunoco on a new Control Room Project and we wish him well. Sunoco’s gain is our loss. John has been a great addition to UCDS and has brought a professionalism which many of our clients have commented on. John has been responsible as a Managing Partner and more recently a Senior Consultant. We wish him well and we will miss him very much.

Dave and Ian will be heading for Trinidad this month and then straight to New Orleans. They will also be working in New York and San Francisco in the next few weeks. This must be a record year for control rooms around the world as we have seen a large growth this year. The good news is that customers are making a significant investment in getting them right and following the ISO 11064 Standards for Ergonomic Design of Control Buildings.

Ian will be the keynote speaker for the HFN Human Factor Conference in Sweden (September 27-28, 2007) and will be the Keynote Speaker at the IFEA Control Room Conference in Norway - Alarmhåndtering og kontrollromsløsninger (November 21-22, 2007) at the Radisson SAS Atlantic Hotel, Stavanger, Norway. Ian will also be a guest speaker at the Linköping University. He is excited about returning to Sweden and Norway. They are smart people and do an incredible job with high standards and state of the art technology, which the rest of the world can only learn from.

It sounds like a good time to be visiting our good friends Mark and Marie Green in Norway who run a Human Centered Design company called HCD. Mark and Marie are good people and have a lot in common with Ian, apart from being British! We share a common bond as we use similar methodologies and have high standards.

Back here at UCDS - Melinda’s daughter celebrated her first Birthday. It is nice to see babies growing up and being very healthy. Ian was shocked to hear John’s baby Tess talking up a storm while he and John were talking through a staffing study. We have to thank Pat our Accountant for all the hard work she has been putting in these last couple of months as we align ourselves with Command and Control Environments.

We have not seen much of Steve Whitley this month as Design Matters has been fully booked and keeping very busy. We have managed to exchange some emails on a joint project. Steve, if you are out there, we are looking forward to working with you again.

We have been working with John Anderson, Scott Matthews and Anthony Mancuso our CCE console design specialists; it is good to have a credible team behind us, thanks for all your help guys.

Congratulations to our friends in Australia at Worsley Alumina as they have been telling folks about their new Theater Style Control Room which has been named by many as the Control Room of the future. We had two key people over for dinner last month and they shared how well everything has come together and what an impact the new automation is having as they have applied best practices in control, alarm management and human interface design. We are proud to have been a part of these projects and hold them up as an example for the rest of the industry to see what is possible. They, like many others, have had a hard battle convincing management and the workforce the benefits of doing what they did, but now no one is arguing. Well done Worsley!

Photo courtesy of Worsley Alumina