Survival of the Swiftest
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Praxair Digital Director Larry Megan says tomorrow’s manufacturing leaders must embrace
low-cost sensing and other Io T-related technologies to drive plant reliability and efficiency.
The Council Forum / Larry Megan
MANUFACTURING
LEADERSHIP JOURNAL
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Q: What is your role
and focus at your
company?
I manage Praxair Digital which is
an organization that is responsible
for driving new digital innovations
across the enterprise. That includes
manufacturing operations, logistics
and supply chain, internal business
processes, and how we engage with
our end customers
Q: What is the most
pressing issue facing
the manufacturing
industry today?
On the operations side what is most
important to us is to be able to run our
plants in a safe and reliable fashion.
Our process plants are viewed as
utilities by our customers. So high reliability is very important. Also, these
are expensive investments, and they
typically run very large rotating equipment. So keeping those from breaking
unexpectedly is really important to us.
Q: What is the most
important corporate initiative you
are involved in at the
moment related to
manufacturing?
We have a lot of focus around the Io T
space where we’ve been doing more
and more to use existing data that you
would typically collect in a process
plant (temperatures, pressures, flows,
etc.) But we are also adding new in-
strumentations to collect data that we
haven’t had before such as very high
speed vibration logging equipment so
that, if a machine fails, you have data
at a granular enough level so that a
true machinery expert can understand
and diagnose what the problem is.
Q: What will be the
most important lead-
ership qualities to pos-
sess in the future?
A level of technical comfort has to
be there. You can’t be adverse to new
technology. You have to be able to
react and adapt quickly. The folks who
are able to react the fastest are the ones
who are going to be the winners.
Also, people need to think harder
about what are the expectations of the
folks at the shop floor level. What does
the operator of the future look like?
What are the skills that they will need?
As automation does more and more, I
don’t need somebody to sit in front of
a computer watching the plant 10
hours a day. I need them to have
a more meaningful role in understanding how the plant is working
and what can be improved.
Q: What will be the
greatest opportunities for manufacturers over the next
five years?
I hope it’s around lower-cost
sensing. You can only act on what
you measure, so what can we do
to reduce the cost of sensors that
go into the plants? And that applies
not just to sensors themselves but the
ability to interface that data back to
your DCS, ERP, and other systems.
To do that at a much lower cost will
allow us to push the plant harder with
respect to reliability and efficiency.
Q: What is your favor-
ite activity outside of
work or the last book
you read?
The last book I read was Digital@
Scale (by Jürgen Meffert and Anand
Swaminathan) which is about how
do you actually create transformative
change in an organization? Also, we
have four kids between the ages of 8
and 11, so they keep me pretty busy.
Larry Megan
Company: Praxair, Inc.
Location: Danbury, CT
Size: $10.5 billion
Industry: Industrial gases
Website: http://www.praxair.com/
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