- EDITOR'S CORNER -
GE is holding their 7th Monitoring & Diagnostics User Forum in Chicago this week and our Editor in Chief, Alan Ross, will be presenting. Since he is attending the Forum, we have asked him to provide a report on the proceedings. Here is his dispatch.
It is a privilege to be asked to present at this GE User Forum, where some of the best practitioners are sharing their knowledge and expertise. John McDonald from GE, Diego Robalino from Megger and one of our Contributing Editors, Claude Beauchemin from TJH2B and Mark Goff from EPS are just a few of those contributing. More importantly, utility practitioners like Chris Root from Vermont Electric, Elizabeth Bray from Southern Company, Rich Schneider from Alabama Power and Brian Hollingshaus from Duke Energy are also here, sharing their “real life” experience with monitoring and diagnostics of utilities.
One of things that is most impressive about this event, is how much of the information is not limited to GE products or services but is transferrable to any monitoring and diagnostic solution. For instance, the application of Asset Life-cycle Management (ALM), while presented as a service that GE can and does provide, as a reliability professional, I was delighted to see that the principles taught during this Training Track were clearly aligned with reliability principles and was aligned with the core purpose of ISO 55000.
For GE M&D customers, I would highly recommend you attend any future User Forums. I asked Mark Cheatham, North American M&D Sales Director for some background on the event:
“We started the GE M&D User forum 7 years ago with the goal of bringing our end users together to discuss substation equipment monitoring techniques and best practices with the aim to improve overall condition-based asset management strategies for our customers and within the industry.
Many of our GE Monitoring and Diagnostics team members have come from utilities or industrial backgrounds responsible for operations, maintenance and asset monitoring of substation equipment. There was a core group both within GE M&D and our customers that felt the industry needed a forum dedicated solely to asset monitoring to drive the state of the art.
While the meetings are by invite only and only for GE end users, we do not limit the meeting to focusing on GE M&D solutions. The event has always been user driven with the majority of our presentations provided by our end users, combined with some GE M&D equipment and software training and 3rd party industry experts coming in to provide presentations based on emerging industry trends each year.“
As one of those 3rd party speakers I can attest to the value, the collaboration and the community that this event creates.