
The first VMA Valve Industry Knowledge Forum, April 11-13 in Savannah, GA, provided a potpourri of topics for valve industry professionals from all disciplines. In addition to 20-plus excellent presentations, from onboarding new employees to the evolution of control valve diagnostics, lively conversations and networking opportunities inspired new collaborations among attendees. Participants could also mix and match tracks (choosing from Human Resources, Technical and Manufacturing), so engineers who would normally not have an opportunity to attend HR events could learn about successful training programs and top employment cases, while HR professionals had the chance to learn about robotics and understand how that could affect their workforce.
In Part 1, we focus on the Technical and Manufacturing tracks; the second part of this article will cover Human Resources presentations.