What is your department’s role within VALEMO?
I’m in charge of the Engineering Department, which is responsible for providing tools and expertise to support VALEMO’s other activities, such as operations and maintenance. It is also within this department that we develop the remote management PLCs we install on certain power plants, to ensure supervision and facilitate data feedback for subsequent processing by our tools.
What are the issues/challenges facing your department?
Our service faces a number of challenges, the main one probably being that of variety:
- That of the technologies we work with, which are constantly evolving,
- And that of our users’ business needs, which requires us to find practical, tailor-made solutions to bring them added value.
What are the next steps for your service?
The next steps for our department will be closely linked to supporting VALEMO’s growth. The main challenge will be to integrate a growing number of plants, often heterogeneous in terms of technology and management.
Automation will necessarily play a key role in this evolution, implying a growing need for tools to standardize processes and effectively manage this diversity while maintaining a high level of performance.
As a result, we’re going to have more and more users, who will be demanding more and more functions, themselves of increasing complexity.
To meet this challenge, we will need to continue strengthening our development and deployment methods, in order to maintain a high level of reliability and efficiency at reasonable development costs.