It’s not often that editors go out and buy their own review copies of a book, but then it’s not often that they feel absolutely compelled to review a particular book through the shear force of the author’s personality, even when it is transmitted solely by email! If that’s what’s happened to me at a distance of some 9,000 miles then it’s small wonder that Jim Pinto’s "Automation Unplugged" was the ISA’s best selling book at its October show in Houston, nor that it’s already had to be reprinted, given that the man himself was on the spot to bludgeon prospective purchasers into submission – and then autograph their copies once handed over the folding green stuff.  That said, it’s hard to imagine any of them actually regretting the purchase, even if they may, particularly if they work for almost any major automation vendor, finish up hurling it at the dog.

 

Since Jack Grenard decided that sailing was a whole lot more fun than news-letter editing - I know how he feels - and his Industrial Controls Intelligence and PLC Insider newsletter, to which Pinto was a regular contributor, was transubstantiated into a different animal, Pinto has been effectively the sole entirely independent commentator on the automation industry, on his side of the Atlantic at least. He’s regularly published in a host of journals and on web sites such as Automation Techies and Control.com and, most importantly, he produces his own Connections for Growth & Success eNewsletter (sign up for free at www.JimPinto.com if you haven’t already done so; do it from home if you work for one of those companies that blocks it) and runs a series of weblogs on the automation industry leaders where their employees are able to air the news and views that doesn’t find its way on to the company notice board or into the house magazine. As such he’s an invaluable source of inside information, an objective commentator on the state of the industry or a pain in the backside, depending on where precisely you’re coming from.

 

Dull it isn't

“Automation Unplugged” is a collection of Pinto’s journalism - and poetry – from the past decade or so. As such it’s something of a curate’s egg – good in parts – but, like the man himself, it’s never dull and if you think he’s wrong, you still have to concede that he’s wrong in an interesting way. His greatest strength as a commentator on the industry is his inside knowledge of its workings, extending right back to his days in the UK instrument industry of the early ’60s, through his years as founder, president and CEO of Action Instruments in the US to his present role of guru, business angel and futurologist. In that time he’s assembled a huge network of contacts at all levels of the industry in both the US and Europe, a small cadre from which is deployed to introduce the book and its various sections:

‘father of the PLC’ Dick Morley, Emerson Process Management president and Fieldbus Foundation chairman John Berra, former Action Instruments president and current I/O Select CEO Frank Williams, Rosemount Analytical president and former Bailey Controls president and CEO Bud Keyes, former IEC Fieldbus Standards Committee convenor and ISA SP50 chairman Dick Caro and InTech editor Greg Hale. That line up’s worth the 26 Euros Eoin O’Riain will charge you for a copy on the Readout website without throwing in Pinto’s contribution as well!

 

One disadvantage of republishing material that may be a year or two old or more, even when it’s been updated specifically for this volume, is that it may no longer be relevant – I’m not sure there’s any real point, for example, in going over the fieldbus saga again, other than for historical interest or, perhaps, as a warning to future standardization enthusiasts – or you may just be proved dead wrong. Pinto first predicted that the ‘Industrial Automation Big 10’ would become the ‘Big 5’ by the end of 2000. They didn’t, of course, but he’s till predicting the same outcome, even if the timescale has now stretched to “within the next couple of years.”

 

“Hey, if I’m wrong,” he says, “I still won’t be far off.” In a way that’s what’s so engaging about the book – most prophets would simply bury their failed predictions in the sure and certain knowledge that everyone will have either forgotten or will be too idle to go back and check. Not Pinto – he gets them down off the shelf, dusts them off and wheels them out again. Me – I’m still sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting to see whether my prediction of last January that Invensys would last the year will survive for another 30 days. Those active in the industry will find the first section on the automation majors the most enjoyable, the second on marketing the most useful – most will agree with Frank Williams that Pinto on ‘disintermediation’ should be required reading for senior executives in this industry – the third on future technology the most thought provoking and, depending on your taste, the poetry the most memorable or the most missable.

 

Penetrating analysis

Pinto’s analysis of the current state of the industry in general and the major players in particular is penetrating and contro-versial. He’s a self-confessed Emerson fan while the names Yurko and now Haythornthwaite are clearly enough to bring him out in spots. That despite the fact that, as he makes a special point of explaining, he no longer has any connection with Invensys and doesn’t own any stock in the company – lucky him, I hear you say. Nevertheless he’s clearly deeply upset at the fate of Action Instruments, which he sold to Eurotherm which in turn was almost immediately acquired by Siebe, the company merged by Alan Yurko with BTR (Birmingham Tyre and Rubber, Jim, not British) to create Invensys. Methinks he doth protest a little too much at this point, implying that when he sold out to Eurotherm, everything in that particular garden was rosy, whereas it was of course common knowledge at the time, and had been for some time previously, that all was by no means well there either.

 

Where's the technology?

Given his huge enthusiasm for technology in all its manifestations, it is perhaps surprising how little consideration Pinto gives to the role of technology in the creation of today’s winners and losers in the automation stakes.

 

Honeywell’s domination of the industry in the ’80s and ’90s can surely be attributed directly to its pioneering of the DCS concept with TDC 2000 - even if Yokogawa would dispute the claim to be first - at a time when most other vendors were muttering about the folly of entrust-ing

your plant to a length of co-ax. Similarly Emerson’s current strength as a systems vendor has to be traced back to the decision in the early ’90s to take a ‘clean sheet of paper’ approach to the development of DeltaV.

 

There’s no doubt that you can’t succeed in this game without excellent management, but it’s pretty clear too that you need to have, and be first to have, some excellent technology to manage. Pinto’s technology predictions throw light on what the hot technologies may be a few years down the road but they don’t tell us much, if anything, about what’s going to be hot in automation systems next year.

 

To judge by the passions it’s aroused in the last few weeks on Pinto’s own Invensys weblog (see above), it could just be ArchestrA, or is that too ironic to be true? All of which is pretty much nit picking and carping – the real review of ‘Automation Unplugged’ is just one sentence long. If your work brings you into contact with the automation industry, either as a vendor, an intermediary, a user or simply a spectator, “Read this book!”

Andrew Bond in Industrail Automation Insider December 2003