Meet Our New Control and Automation Lead

What's your professional background?

I have over 40 years’ hands on involvement in the industrial control arena, providing integrated control & automation solutions to a wide range of end users and OEMs in general, including manufacturing, food & beverage, utilities, nuclear, aerospace & defence.  

I studied electrical and electronic engineering, then computer science in Bristol and Plymouth, and I've been involved in automation technology since the conception of programmable logic control back in the 1980s.  

I have also managed by own company, dealing with sales and project management in the control systems integration business.   

What Does a Control and Automation Lead do?

I provide a wide range of solutions across machine and process control applications. Whether you need a bespoke control panel built to exacting standards, custom PLC software for a critical production system, or a carefully managed migration away from ageing legacy equipment — we have the expertise to help.     

What are you most looking forward to about the new role?    

Nivalis are lovely people, professional and very good at what they do, a pleasure to work with and I am excited to be part of the team. 

I am looking forward to expanding their services by developing an automation and control side to Nivalis - this doesn't currently exist and will allow Nivalis to expand their employee engineering resources with specialist automation engineers to cater for this new work.   

Do you foresee any challenges in the new role?    

I am looking forward to the challenge of talking with prospective customers about Nivalis now leading on Automation and Control Systems and not just Ice Pigging. 

It's currently all about Ice Pigging, naturally, so I am looking forward to working with the whole team to see how we integrate automation into the overall Nivalis services package.  

Can you give us an example of an interesting or bizarre job you’ve worked on?     

Every Automation job is bespoke and a one-off, with budgets ranging from £1,000 to £350,000. Most projects I've worked on have been covered by NDAs so difficult to mention specifics, however I have worked on lots of strange and wonderful jobs over the years - I just can't tell you about them!