Event Highlights
More and more manufacturers are seeing the measurable benefits that a virtual infrastructure can bring to their production environment and making the leap. Despite the increasing popularity of virtualization, many manufacturers are hesitant to make the transition, often feeling they don’t have the proper IT capability to do so effectively. Read more.
Does your organization view the cloud as technology for the future? Or a sophisticated networking and industrial computing prospect available only to large enterprise? It's time to rethink what's possible now. Every manufacturer – especially small- and mid-size operations that feel constrained by IT bandwidth, infrastructure assets and application engineering resources – can confidently make the move to cloud-based computing. Read more.
With all the performance-boosting technology solutions that Rockwell Automation brings to bear on behalf of its industrial customers, it's sometimes easy to forget that Rockwell Automation is a global manufacturer in its own right. As such, it shares many of the same challenges that its customers around the world face–and benefits from those same technology solutions. Read more.
Collaboration is always crucial to innovation, improved productivity and adding value in all manufacturing applications–what evolves are the automation tools for making those tasks easier and helping users along their respective roads. Chief among these enabling forces is Rockwell Automation's Studio 5000 software, which has numerous functions for helping users design more capable machines. Read more.
Condition monitoring is the process of detecting, identifying and acting on faults before a failure occurs or before a machine can no longer perform its intended function. "But the process of a traditional 'Walk-Around Predictive Maintenance Program' has its share of challenges," says Scot Wlodarczak. "This mode of predictive maintenance largely relies on the vibration expert and data collected on intervals as long as monthly or quarterly. So you can miss failures." Read more.
Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a research-driven biopharmaceutical company devoted to identifying, developing and marketing biopharmaceutical therapies in the fields of infertility, obstetrics, urology, gastroenterology, endocrinology and osteoarthritis. With historical roots extending back to the 1950s Ferring continues to be a pioneer in developing and selling pharmaceutical products based upon natural, pituitary-produced peptide hormones. Read more.
Rockwell Automation takes seriously the needs of its users to access information when on the go. For years now, they've have offered the ability to send text or email notifications to mobile devices or replicate in-plant or desktop user interfaces on portable screens. But the true power of today's mobile technology lies not in its ability to provide simple information access on a tablet or smartphone. Read more.
There's no slowing down in the automotive industry. Customers with a range of differing priorities mean you're producing more vehicles in more variations than ever, while also undergoing more frequent design refreshes. This is in addition to meeting fuel-efficiency regulations and serving emerging global markets under increasingly tight profit margins. Read more.
Before the existence of networked, intelligent automation components, one might have assumed that the most important skill of a maintenance engineer was clairvoyance. They seemed to divine the source of equipment problems, understanding their facility's health as if it were their own. It wasn't magic. It was decades of cumbersome, time-consuming troubleshooting. Read more.
Recipes are the heart, soul and driving force behind all batch management systems, and as such, they must be handled with the respect, attentiveness and security they deserve. However, as batch systems and the products they produce grow ever more complex and varied, these primary batch missions are becoming more complicated as well. Read more.
Every 15 seconds somewhere in the world, a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease. That's an astonishing number. "So in an hour-long presentation on safety, 240 people on the planet will die because of an occupational accident, said Steve Ludwig. "That's more than 2.3 million deaths per year, according to data from the International Labour Organization." Read more.
From a constant stream of mobile device releases to the explosion of cloud applications for all areas of business, technology advancements are happening at such an exhausting pace today that it's easy to get paralyzed by the possibilities. It's intimidating to think about how any organization can plan quickly enough to leverage such changes for competitive advantage. Read more.
You can't control what you don't measure. That old chestnut is perfectly apt when it comes to energy management capabilities in most production facilities, a fact that begs explanation, since energy contributes about one-third of all manufacturing costs. What explains the overlooking of a critical production input? Until now, most producers have been unable to pinpoint energy consumption. Read more.
Big Data starts with the right data. And the Internet of Things starts with the internet of your things. Such were the useful framing mechanisms shared by presenters at this week's Rockwell Automation TechED conference in Orlando, Florida., to help the hundreds of automation and IT professionals in attendance begin to apply these powerful, but sometimes overwhelming concepts to the realities they'll face upon return home. Read more.
The cost of downtime is enormous. "Sometimes we don't have the time to sit back and analyze what it costs, because we're so focused on getting it fixed quickly," noted Sal Conti, Rockwell Automation product manager, introducing his session, "Scalable Secure Remote Access Solutions," this week at the Rockwell Automation TechED conference in Orlando, Florida. Read more.
Wireless can save cabling and installation costs, deliver previously unreachable signals and data, and reduce infrastructure and maintenance expenses. But many potential users are still hesitant to evaluate and implement it, according to Rob Snyder, product manager for Rockwell Automation's Stratix 5100 wireless access points, and Scott Friberg, senior applications engineer in Cisco's Internet of Things (IoT) group. Read more.
In a successful industrial manufacturing environment, data is king. During two sessions at the Rockwell Automation TechED conference this week in Orlando, Fla, attendees learned both how displaying and representing operating data to process operators should be done to maximize operator awareness and performance, and how proper data collection, organization, and recordkeeping make life easier for companies with regulatory compliance responsibilities. Read more.
