What do "You" do, before trying something new?
We seek, when trying something new, pretty much exclusively for the balance between risk and upside. Whether we decide to detour due to a traffic jam, or try a new brand of pasta potentially moving away from the brand you have been happy with for years.
With the use of new technology we go through the same weighing. Should we use a smart phone to be better connected, and to often we conveniently forget about the time it will steel from us during the day. Those that are looking at it from the bright side will bring forward that they got in contact with someone from the past, got a better deal due to being on line and able to respond fast, and or was able to establish a higher level of social life. So it has a good dose of rational thinking and a good dose of emotion. Hence the reason why some people switch on with something new quickly and others will never get it.
These choices that we make every minute in our private life are not at all different from the choices we make in our professional life. In many of the decisions I make, when it comes down to choosing new technology, I will first try to learn about it and zoom in on its options, its capabilities, and its design and installation criteria. Obviously the ROI we can achieve with it but above all "Will it help me to improve my plant reliability, efficiency without compromising safety". In addition I want to know, who out there has used this before and what is their success, and given that in a plant design environment I have to deal with a 25 to 35 years life time of the plant, how does this new technology fit in, or better what is the commitment of the vendors in this space.
So when Emerson started to come to the market over 10 years ago, potential users exactly asked for all of that. Now more than 10 years later and billions of hours of operation and in thousands of applications out there, WirelessHART now has proven itself as a very reliable choice for many of your applications. However, I understand that some of you are still trying to learn from successes out there, and you want help to build your understanding so that you can start making use of technology that I know now is making a very significant difference in many applications out there. Download your weekend read here just on 4 specific applications, but I am sure you will get hungry for more.
A friend of mine has written an application book that I found very inspirational in terms of real applications served with WirelessHART, and I will be happy to connect you with him.
Are you here to make a living, or are you here to make a difference?
Realize that in our roles, serving operations to measure better, process better may not challenge us each day to try something new. In fact more often than ones they will see it as a risk. They count on our professionalism and thoroughness in the assessment of new technology but will enjoy our proposals that help efficiency, reliability and does not compromise safety.
Bert