COSMOS- TORY TECH TAG

On Thursday, December 7th, Tory Technologies had our 4th Annual MaCRoM User Group Meeting. The event was filled with lots of interesting and insightful topics, from the potential implementation of AI in control rooms, to fatigue management, and the future of MaCRoM®. After months of planning and preparation, we covered it all in a three-hour event. While the meeting will be uploaded on our video platform, ToryVideo, we want to give you the highlights here in this blog post. Keep reading to learn more about this year’s MaCRoM User Group Meeting!

We kicked off the event with an overview of the agenda from our host, Lorena Del Toro, Business Analyst at Tory-Tech. A welcome message from Rene Varon, our President and CEO. He spoke about the growth of our amazing company this year, the improvements we’ve made to our products and IT solutions, the development and advancement of MaCRoM, and the commitments we are making as a company to continue to provide the best services to our clients. Rene also reinforced our vision to continue investing in cybersecurity, ensuring the protection of our clients’ data. After his compelling opening message, we were able to hear from our keynote speaker, Daniel Nagala.

Dan has over 45 years of experience in industrial control systems and an extensive background in pipeline operations, control room management, and cybersecurity. We were honored to have him present to share his valuable insights with us. He spoke about the development of AI over the past century and how the rapid adaptation of AI in society might influence the integration of AI systems into control rooms. After this insightful keynote, Tory-Tech had a surprise for the guests: our AI-generated avatar, Tory. She and other avatars will be seen exclusively in ToryVideo, where we will be uploading our release notes and information on MaCRoM development.

Next up, we had our first-ever panel present to discuss fatigue mitigation, workload analysis, and shift scheduling, moderated by Rosie Palacios, who is a part of our business development team here at Tory-Tech. This hour-long panel featured a special group of panelists who have valuable experience in control room management. Our panelists included Rafael Paes, Transport and Operations Manager at TAG in Brazil; Steven Dittman, Pipeline Operations Center Manager at Marathon Pipeline in Findlay, OH; Billy Bown, Operation Center Manager at Marathon Pipeline in San Antonio, TX; Keith Cargill, Technical Gas Control Manager at Enbridge in Houston, TX; Gavin Fisher, Technical Specialist at Enbridge Canada in Calgary, AB; and Hayden Bellmore, Regulatory Compliance Specialist at Wolverine in Portage, MI. It was wonderful to be able to hear about the way these companies manage these topics, especially the perspective from the operations in Brazil and Canada. Juan Serinyà, Tory-Tech CTO and MaCRoM Product Director, and Rene Varon were also able to chime in on how MaCRoM makes the management processes more efficient.

COSMOS- TORY TECH TAG

After the panel, we were able to hear from Juan Serinyà, who presented the MaCRoM Roadmap. In his presentation, Juan talked about the development updates and the major new features released in MaCRoM 5 this year, including the latest version of underlying technologies, updates to the user interface, a new shift management function, and much more. Juan also talked about some features in progress to be released soon and features that might potentially be added to the application in future updates. To learn more about the new MaCRoM 5 features, contact us to view the release notes!

To close out our User Group Meeting, we heard from our Tech and Operations team for MaCRoM. Juan Torres, Director of MaCRoM Operations, introduced the team and the topics they would be discussing. Laura Infante, MaCRoM Product Implementation Lead, discussed the updates the team did to provide timely support to clients and ensure that MaCRoM runs as smoothly as possible. Afterward, we heard from Angie Saenz, Customer Experience Lead, who talked about the improvements the MaCRoM customer experience team has made to enhance user-application relationships. She also announced some of the plans they had to improve customer experience, such as moving training material to digital platforms and the continuous integration of AI in ToryVideo. Following Angie’s presentation, Juan Torres took to the floor to discuss MEGA 5 (MaCRoM Expert Group of Advisors) and the features and integrations that will be up for vote in 2024.

We would like to thank everyone who attended and participated in this year’s User Group Meeting. The turnout was incredible and because of that, we had many engaging and informative conversations. We also want to thank the amazing team at Tory-Tech who worked together for months to plan and execute this meeting. Your hard work is extremely appreciated and did not go unnoticed!

Now, you’re probably thinking “Wow! The 2023 User Group Meeting sounds super interesting, and I’d love to hear some of the conversations and presentations.” Well, don’t worry! We’ll be posting a highlights reel on our LinkedIn page very soon, as well as the full meeting on ToryVideo, so stay tuned.

We look forward to seeing you all next year!