Before I entered management, I spent about 15 years as an engineer building "greenfield" drug manufacturing sites using automation packages such as Allen-Bradley, Emerson DeltaV and Siemens. There is nothing more time consuming than trying to tune the hundreds of PID loops in these facilities not only during site acceptance testing of equipment, but also during validation. These companies try to offer PID packages but they were always really inadequate. I wouldve loved a tool like this.

One of my biggest mistakes was tuning a loop during the winter shutdown on a large scale vaccine reactor. It dramatically increased the cells growth rate to a point where we would have had to modify our drug application. Understandably, the regulatory people had me de-tune the loop.