The OPC and MES Day Finland 2013 was held last week (Oct 15th) in Hotel Rosendahl, Tampere. This yearly event is organized by the Finnish Society of Automation and the tradition of OPC events in Finland is already a pretty long. This time we had 108 people registered and the day was indeed full of good presentations from invited speakers and sponsors of the event.

Key Notes

The day was started with a common session in the morning. Key note speakers were Jan Snoeij from MESA international, Paul Hunkar and Matthias Damm from OPC Foundation, Bianca Scholten from Accenture and Pasi Ahonen from VTT. These presentations varied a lot in subject; from the top managerial issues (MES business benefits + Who owns the IT systems in a plant?) to low technical details (OPC use cases and benefits + Improving manufacturing cyber security), but laid out the overall complexity of running and maintaining successful manufacturing IT systems in modern production lines.

Technical

In the afternoon we were split to two sessions: the OPC and MES, although some of the presentations covered a bit of both, e.g. PLCOpen MES integration and OPC UA for ISA95.

Use Cases

In the afternoon we also had a good number of interesting presentations from the sponsors, who could tell and demonstrate real use cases of OPC UA in practice.

History in Finland

The first OPC event held in Finland took place already in 2002. The complete history of the Finnish events is as follows:

• 2002 OPC Roadshow
• 2003 OPC Session as part of SoftSympo ’03 (Automaatiopäivät 2003)
• 2005-2011 OPC Day Finland
• 2011 MES Day Finland
• 2012-2013 OPC & MES Day Finland

History in Europe

And we have also started the same tradition in Europe with several local and Europe wide events having already arranged as follows by the OPC Europe:

• 2011-2013 OPC Day Europe
• 2011 OPC Day France, Belgium
• 2012 OPC Day Austria, France
• 2013 OPC Day Italy