Innovative Thinking

Dedicated departments for engineering, environment, health and safety can be found in almost every mid to large sized manufacturing company. These departments have little collective knowledge-pool and coherence, since traditionally their KPIs have very little overlapping. For instance, engineers continuously work with operations to improve productivity & efficiency of the equipment, while safety professionals analyze & reduce risks. Therefore, it’s very rare for the two departments to cross paths. However, this attitude has to change if an enterprise wants to keep itself at par with the competition and adjust according to the latest market trends.

There’s no single way to do something right. Instead there are multiple paths of which the most suitable one must be chosen according to the situation. HMIs play a vital role in driving the industrial bandwagon, providing us with monitoring, control & automation capabilities. When working with HMIs, there are a few factors that you should be particularly careful about. All of these have been discussed in detail below.

Despite the string of advancements in the field of automation, robotics remains a relatively young field, holding promises that would take years to mature on a large-scale. The success of robots however has sparked interest of several businesses, and many have started migrating towards this technology.

It’s strange how so many of us accept the existence of robots and the role they play in our life, but so little of us actually know about the brains behind such technology. FANUC is one of those companies that has its hands in everything, but is almost never publicly recognized for it. FANUC is the world’s largest maker of industrial robots, and has over 400,000 machines dedicated to this task.

At one point or another, a manufacturing company looking to automate their systems would require the services of a System Integrator (SI). Knowing about the traits and practices of a good System Integrator can go a long way, and help build a system that pays itself off with the passage of time.

In a world driven by competitiveness, companies are getting more anticipative about the concept of 3D printing when it comes to expanding their manufacturing capabilities and bringing down costs. The fourth industrial revolution is upon us, one that would drive greater efficiencies by relying on latest digital technologies as well as on mass amounts of data from all ends. When such factors come into play, the concept of 3D printing becomes highly relevant and necessary for increasing competitiveness in the market.     

Winners of the 2017 System Integrator of the Year award were asked to provide valuable advance on system designs and technologies including HMIs, wireless, cloud, Industrial IoT, etc. so that others may get better insight and get acquainted with best practices.

Vibrations, what may seem like so irrelevant and benign are actually quite serious, and possess the tendency to damage a machine’s sensitive components. When dealing with industrial machines, shaking is something for which all damping efforts are made beyond a known threshold. The major task is to determine whether the magnitude of oscillation being faced can be tolerated or if needs to be stopped.

The ultimate goal of Internet of Things based technologies & equipment is to phase-out manual processes and replace them with efficient, automated ones. With the introduction of IoT to industrial environments, new automated systems are emerging that are able to take care of all processes involved with asset management, right from collecting data to carrying out inspections through in-depth analysis.

Whether it’s a PLC, a PAC or a PC, a controller is a fundamental piece of hardware required for an automated system to function. Controllers have been around for decades, and have faced great technological automation. Specifying controllers for a particular application has gained increased amount of complexity due to the many options available. Quality, cost, ease of use, functionality, etc. are just some of the factors that have to be taken into account before specifying a PLC.

Be True to the Requirements

Every project has its own specific requirements. When working with a controller, it’s important to know its functionalities and limitations. There’s nothing worse than selecting a particular device and then uncovering its pitfalls halfway in the project. Before you commit to a controller, its best to bench test the process.