APC SMART was established by Dr Kevin Brooks to bring his 25 years of experience in the Advanced Process Control (APC) field to market. With his consultancy, Kevin aims to promote the use of well-established tools, bring measurable benefits to his clients and help mentor those who would like to get into this exciting industry.
Kevin obtained his PhD from the Chemical Engineering department at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and was a member of staff for a number of years. He was honoured to be invited back in 2019 as an adjunct visiting professor.

On leaving academia, he became involved in steady-state modelling and design for chemical processes. He joined Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions in 1995, where he was involved in dynamic modelling for operator training simulators. He moved to advanced process control (APC) and optimisation and was subsequently appointed Engineering Leader for Advanced Process Control. He led projects in both South Africa and Europe, in particular Eastern Europe. In 2007 Kevin joined BluESP, the Aspentech distributor for South Africa, as a principal consultant and later chief engineer. In this capacity, he has performed projects in ethylene, fuel gas network optimization and novel applications in the mining industry. He moved to Hatch, a large EPC, as Global APC Lead, in 2020 where he did the groundwork to set up APC as a differentiated service offering for the company.
Kevin was elected president of the South African Council for Automation and Control (SACAC) in January 2013, and held this position for two years, a period which included the hosting of the very successful IFAC World Congress in Cape Town. He has been on the Exco of SACAC since 2007 and is chair of the National Organising Committee for the International Federation of Automatic Control sponsored Control Conference Africa 2021, run by SACAC