Even though industrial Ethernet networks are becoming more common, some users still need to maintain and install ControlNet systems.

Smart manufacturing is having a global impact on the manufacturing industry as a whole and turning it into an economic powerhouse.

Smart manufacturing seems to have the whole world's attention right now. Government leaders from countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, India, China, and the U.S. are banking on smart manufacturing's potential to strengthen their manufacturing industries and their economies with an infusion of advanced information technologies (IT) and a 21st-century business mindset.

With variable frequency drive (VFD) commissioning, aspects such as design, codes and standards, and the nature of a specific project need to be considered.

How valuable is a reduction in installation and commissioning time? Investigating some of the items discussed below can help users in choosing, configuration, and commissioning variable frequency drives (VFDs). 

Hiring the right employees is hard enough, but how do you also ensure they have the right skills?

If you’re like most manufacturers, your most experienced employees are also those closest to retirement. Replacing them without creating quality gaps won’t be easy or cheap – studies show that without a proper knowledge transfer plan, the cost to replace a senior engineer is between 300% and 500% of the senior employee’s salary. Putting the proper training procedures into place can help ensure no tribal knowledge is lost when your senior employees hand over the keys.

Panel location and budget are always thought about when building control rooms, but aspects such as size, spacing, NEMA rating, mounting, and heating and cooling need to be considered, as well.

Control panel enclosure sizing almost always represents a challenge faced by automation system designers. Electrical room sizes tend to be established last after the floor plan, process areas, mechanical equipment, piping, etc., so they often tend to have too little space allocated.

Storyboarding as the first step in high-performance HMI migrationThe first step in migrating to a high-performance human-machine interface (HP-HMI) should always be storyboarding, which offers a visual representation of the layout and hierarchy of the new high-performance graphics (HPGs). This helps operators become an active part of the migration planning process.

Human-machine interface (HMI) migration can be a painful process—especially for operators who have resisted the move from 1st or 2nd generation CRT-based graphics to the new world of gray-scale, ASM-compliant displays with little color and greater concentration of process and instrumentation. One of the prime benefits of migrating to high-performance HMI (HP-HMI) is a reduction in the total number of graphics by as much as 25 to 50%.

An absolute encoder, while necessary and useful, can offer some challenges if the user doesn’t understand the mathematics of how they work and function.

Too much work goes into project planning to forget about a deployment plan. The deployment plan should include safety requirements and be used by both your team and the customer to ensure project success. 

In this day and age, everyone has a plan. People have one-year plans, five-year plans, ten-year plans, and other plans designed to help them forge ahead and prepare for the future and the unexpected.