Let's continue our 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert podcast series with MC Chow. MC has more than two decades of experience in process automation and safety. He works with process manufacturers and producers to modernize their control and safety systems in order to improve safety, reliability and efficiency.

If you have an Emerson expert you'd like me to interview and questions to ask, leave me a comment below… thanks!

Transcript

Jim: Hi, I'm Jim Cahill. And today, on the "5 Questions for an Emerson Expert" podcast series, I'm joined by MC Chow. MC is a control and safety system modernization consultant who helps process manufacturers, create a vision, and identify opportunities to improve safety, reliability, and efficiency when planning to modernize their control systems. He has more than 20 years' experience in process automation and safety. Welcome, MC.

MC: Thank you, Jim.

Jim: So I always like to start out and ask, when you were growing up, what led you to study in one of the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, specifically mechanical engineering and then control engineering in your case?

MC: Yeah. Good question, Jim. When I was growing up, I was a bit of a car nut. I enjoyed looking at pictures of cars. And my uncle was a mechanic, and he let me work on his cars. We worked on some of things that...and he taught me a lot about working on cars. So I was mechanically inclined growing up. When I got into high school, one of the things I really wanted to do was become an automotive engineer. But when I found out how little opportunities there were where I was growing up, I took a class in mechanical engineering and then ended up enjoying it. And that actually leads me into the next part, where my first job was actually going back with a fisher rep in Malaysia, where I grew up, and that introduced me to the world of process automation and control. Doing that for three years, I thought I needed more education. So I went back to school and got my bachelor's degree in control engineering.

Jim: Well, that's a fascinating path into our industry, and I guess that also describes that path. So that was your starting point into process safety and automation, or where did the safety part come in?

MC: Well, if I back up, before I got into safety, when I got that first job with the Fisher Rep, I had no idea what a control valve was. That introduced me to the world of process automation and control. So going through that, after my bachelor's degree, I went fully into the world of instrumentation and control. And the safety part kicked in a little bit later, maybe five years into my career. I learned about process safety and what a safety system was, and that peaked my interest, and I ended up self-teaching myself a lot of the safety aspects of our industry. And as it evolved into the process safety management regime that we have today, that set me up very nicely in the early years. Somehow, it just caught on with me, and I developed a personal interest in it, and it grew. And, thankfully, working with Emerson, I got into the Emerson world with a local business partner in the early days of the Emerson DeltaV SIS product, and that was the springboard to my deeper dive, if you like, into the process safety world.

Jim: That's great. So tell us about a recent consulting engagement that you've been involved with.

MC: I thought long and hard about this. All the consulting engagements that I have been involved in two years into my current role has been interesting, but the one that I thought of most had elements of both the process control and safety. I visited a refinery in the northern part of the U.S., small one, which I was asked to come in and consult with a customer about migrating their Legacy Emerson process control system, as well as look into a number of safety systems that they had implemented,