This was the second time this year that Read-out was invited to attend a conference which comprised several strands of expertise run concurrently over a period of two days. While the Manufacturing Excellence Event run by Emerson was held in Warrington, England, the adventurous organisers, Pantek, selected the Irish capital, Dublin for their conference this year. (Last year it was in Grantham in England's Lincolnshire. The historic venue was the site of the famous battle of Clontarf when in the year 1014, Irish High King, Brian Ború, finally defeated the Vikings.

The conference was divided into several streams.

• The Technical Stream, designed for programmers, system integrators, 3rd party developers and internal engineering groups. IT professionals involved in manufacturing also found these sessions beneficial from the standpoint of infrastructure and the future of technologies.

• The Business Stream was targeted on those who benefit from seminars that present business orientated solutions, rather than technical or application development seminars. Plant Managers, OEM prospects and other business professionals within the manufacturing enterprise were among the attendees at these sessions.

• The Product Application Stream looked at how organisations are obtaining the most out of their plant by utilising industrial software solutions and were aimed at programmers, system integrators and internal engineering groups as well as IT professionals involved in manufacturing.

• Meet the Experts was a designated area for delegates who wished to arrange meetings with one of the Business or Product Consultants and salesmen, to talk through any issues away from the conference activity.

• The Products Area was an area dedicated to new and existing products where product consultants were on hand to discuss and demonstrate products and simulate applications.

The meeting then divided into the various sections. This reporter attended the product application series of talks first which discussed the Wonderware application FactorySuite and the FDA especially 21CFR Part II. There were three presentations featuring Duncan Fletcher (Pantek), Graham Miller (BLLP) and Eugene Piggott (Douglas Control & Automation).

Phillip Arlow, Manager for Pantek in Ireland, discussed Tracebility in Process Industries and put the regulatory issues of the FDA into an European and international context.

In the Business Stream Eddie Azod (Parsec) looked at the business benifits of introducing manufacturing systems to monitor and control material flow on the shop floor and how the use of MIS can enhance ERP and finite capacity scheduling systems.

Later the same speaker explained OEE - Overall Equipment Effectiveness - and how it should be applied and how its constituent parts should be examined individually as well as in the overall calculations and can help make really startling savings with a minimum of cost.

Peter Hopkinson (Atos Origin Ltd) examined the major issues that need to be addressed when justifying a fully integrated manufacturing system.

Biztalk Server 2000, was introduced by Jonathan Ulrick (Microsoft) showing how it can lower the cost of implementing integration solutions by reducing the complexity of enterprise application integration. The presentation programme MS Power Point presented some problems during this presentation and the speaker was gracious enough to acknowledge the irony of the situation that this should happen during his particular presentation. Throughout the rest of the conference programme there were no problems with the presentation software.

In a presentation by Simon McEntee (MTL Ltd), and Duncan Fletcher (Pantek) talked about the demands of modern day Process Automation requires faster time to market, lower costs, improved product quality, increased production efficiency and regulatory compliance. To achieve this engineers require Control Systems with integrated yet open architectures and system flexibility derived from modular based off-the-shelf technologies.

ArchestrATM is a comprehensive plant automation and information architecture designed from the outset to extend the life of legacy systems by leveraging the latest software technologies. Steve Lewarne (Wonderware) concluded the conference explaining that offerings built upon this architecture empower decision-makers to achieve their business goals, without abandoning prior investments in automation systems, production processes or intellectual property. ArchestrA is the way forward he emphasised, "make sure you don't miss it!"

The conference attracted over 120 people from Britain and Ireland and a lively interchange of ideas took place between the participants themselves as well as between them and the speakers. All in all it was a very successful event which benefited all who attended.

John Bailey and his team at Pantek deserve high praise for organising this conference and talking to the participants it was obvious that they found it extremely useful and are looking forward to the next one

Ireland welcomes conferences like this and now that travel to the country is so inexpensive more and more international events are being held there. Conference Ireland part of the national tourism initiative which can help in the organisation of such conferences.