With a new administration moving into the White House, there are a lot of changes taking place in the U.S. political landscape. What that means exactly for the fluid sealing industry is not yet known, but the signals indicate a push towards deregulation in a number of areas. They will likely lead to less focus on compliance and more focus on economic opportunity. While the FSA and ESA members can help with the former, we can also help end-users with the latter. Our overall message remains essentially the same: sealing device technologies available today can cost effectively minimise leakage and increase service life, saving companies money in lost production time and lost product in the long run. As mentioned in my last note, our Strategic Planning Committee is beginning the process of reviewing and revising the FSA’s current plan with this new landscape in mind.
In an effort to expand the FSA’s exposure to a larger audience, there is currently a project underway to co-locate our spring technical meetings for the Compression Packing and Gasketing divisions with KCI’s Valve World Americas conference in June in Houston, Texas. With a sizeable attendance of end-users participating in this conference, the FSA will be conducting 2 on-site training sessions- one on proper valve packing installation and one on flange seal installation. These sessions were run successfully at the Fugitive Emissions Summit last year, with 15 or so engineers attending to gain valuable training from sealing device experts. Hopefully with some good Marketing initiatives, these sessions will be even more successful. I’d like to these kinds of projects expanded to other divisions over the coming year. On-site, in-person training sessions seem to be the most effective for our participants, and finding the right venue to deliver these sessions is the challenge.
One final note. The FSA’s Compression Packing Division has monthly Go-To-Meetings to review progress on the Handbook update, technical standards and project updates, with regular participation from our ESA colleagues. This collaboration has been an excellent experience for me and give all of us a chance to keep on-top of a wider range of subjects than we could do alone. The work the ESA CP TC is doing to create a standard to update the ancient BS 4371 standard to meet today’s needs has been excellent; this kind of work is important to all of us and is something we can use globally across our industry.
I look forward to attending the ESA’s AGM this coming may and seeing how the ESA works first hand.