Operational excellence is a philosophy of continuous improvement, targeting both profitability as well as customer satisfaction by optimizing physical and business processes, improving management and workers’ capabilities, and reducing capital cost. Operational excellence touches on virtually all aspects of manufacturing inside the fence and all possible impacts on the producers’ environment. ARC's Seventh Process Management Academy (PMA) is a European platform for sharing knowledge and promoting operational excellence in the process industries. Industrial accidents and disasters have demonstrated that a 'safety culture' and clear organizational principles must complement safety-related automation. PMA will address how to implement behavioral, organizational, and technical aspects of process safety with the objective of 100% safe operations. Considerable progress has been made in the domain of worker safety, and methods to guarantee patient safety through production and authentication are in full development. The safety of workers, clients, and patients is indirectly related to process safety, and has similar components that PMA will deal with as well. Energy efficiency and carbon footprint will remain 'hot' issues in the coming years. Water usage and energy consumption are closely correlated. The challenge is to find quick and cost effective ways to reduce consumption of fossil fuels and other utilities, and to improve yields. PMA will contain testimonials on profitable sustainability improving solutions. In summary, PMA will include a series of educational presentations by industry experts on the impact of human and automated action on the safety of processes, workers, clients, patients, and the environment. This includes a prominent speaker from the scientific world who will provide the audience with ideas to support profitable operational excellence with emerging technologies. A representative of the European Commission will explain the 7th Framework Program for research and development in the control and communication domains, and initiate a dialogue with users and providers with the ultimate goal to improve the industrial relevance of the program. Manufacturers will present their best practices, benchmarking results, and methods of using technologies, and discuss how they overcame problems and obtained benefits by applying solutions. Edited by Constanze Schmitz
