What are the major economic, regulatory, and globalization forces that are driving companies to significantly redefine their processes and competitive positioning?  Where are the developing technologies being created, both within our technology suppliers, as well as innovative operating companies?  For the first time, daratechPLANT will also be featuring the early and innovative research being conducted at some of North America’s top universities.  

• Global economic forces and how it will affect the plant industries in the next five years.
• Emerging information standards and how they will affect our business
• Global collaboration through technology- what is the industry learning and what new possibilities does it open up?
• The changing face of regulatory requirements and what directions does this open to the industry participants?
• The impact of information integration.  What does it mean to my corporate strategic IT plan priorities and actions?
• Technology strategies for the mega projects. . .  Technology strategies for the best-in-class operating plants.  What should an organization be focusing on?

The plant industries are seeing a remarkable upgrade in available technologies for the entire lifecycle of a plant, from planning, design, construction, to operations and maintenance.  Who’s innovating and who’s falling behind?  Where have technology vendors invested substantially in the past year to bring new functionality to their customers?  How are new evolving information platforms and data exchange standards affecting the solutions?  Who are the new suppliers, and how are they redefining the approach available for many plant applications?

• What’s new in the delivery of mega-applications from the industry leading suppliers?
• What does plant asset lifecycle management (PALM) mean to the technology vendors and how important is it to the users?
• How are industry standards being integrated within commercial applications?  Has vendor interoperability taken a substantial step forward? What does this mean for the leading user companies?
• How are the large suppliers from design, ERP, simulation, and scheduling arenas working together?   What is the impact for global projects?
• What applications are being used within the plant environment?  Who is delivering tools for plant optimization, fast-track turn around, and management of change (MOC) processes?
• How have the data-centric and document-centric applications come together?

The size, technical challenges, and globalization of projects have led users, on both the owner and EPC sides, to drive innovative uses of the technologies for realizing projects.  What are the best-in-class EPC’s and owners doing to win in this demanding world market?  Where are the wins that companies have achieved in the past year and why were they successful?  What are the leaders doing?

• How is global project management being achieved?
• What are some project examples that, we can say, technology was essential and why?
• Where has technology not met expectations and why?
• How are companies able to leverage technologies to succeed in a tight workforce market? 
• What are the high value project work processes for automation and how are they being realized?
• How are companies leveraging data integration?