Key Personnel

Francois Smit

Managing Director

As Managing Director, Francois' main focus is the development of SimPro into the leading process engineering company in Southern Africa. He is also a registered professional chemical engineer at ECSA specialising in conceptual, basic and detailed engineering. He serves as the main client contact for the VMGSim agency in Southern Africa.

Education

Francois completed his B. Eng (Chemical) at the Potchefstroom University in 1997.

Experience

Francois started working at Pretoria Portland Cement (PPC) as part of his bursary requirements in 1998 . At first he was responsible for managing projects, which included process optimization and evaluation, mill audits and maintaining and improving the quality standards of the different products produced at PPC.

The experience gained on these projects led to his appointment as laboratory manager at PPC Port Elizabeth. Here he supervised thirteen technicians and lab assistants in the daily testing and control of qualitative samples taken at several key points in the production process. His main responsibilities included maintaining and developing the Quality Control System and ensuring the quality of the products produced by PPC Port Elizabeth.

In 2001, he decided to leave the production environment for the engineering consulting industry and joined Megchem Secunda. His main function was the conceptual, basic and detail engineering of projects for various companies. His duties included the development and update of Mechanical Flow Diagrams (MFD) and Process Flow Diagrams (PFD), compiling data sheets with respect to process data required for RFQ's, Hazop's and detail engineering, compiling of line and design tie-in lists and the engineering calculations required for the data sheets and PFD's.

He also gained a lot of experince in using steady state and dynamic simulation software, as well as heat exchanger design software. He regularly formed part of the project management team, Hazop studies, commissioning team and MFD and design review team. A detailed list of projects completed is available on request, most of which involved Sasol.