Top 5 Automation Applications Your Business Can’t Live Without

There’s a plethora of industrial software applications now available from a variety of vendors, both small, point-solutions based companies to the larger, all-in-one industrial automation vendors.  They offer everything from development environments through IT solutions.  But if you look at your critical needs, it comes down to using 5 applications:

What’s the Big Deal about Big Data?

Data is everywhere—lurking in our inboxes; languishing in our plant databases; and lingering in BI tools and analytics meant to provide insight, and intelligence to our everyday tasks.  Long ago I did an analysis of how many plant floor software applications a typical large manufacturing plant had—and it was well over 50.  This included legacy, custom, and commercial off-the-shelf applications for a variety of operations, from quality to production to maintenance.  That’s a lot of data hiding in a lot of applications. 

It’s logical to think that this data can be used for more than the sum of its parts—and that’s the foundation for products such as Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI). EMI puts real-time and near-real time transactional or plant data into context or relationships with one another, allowing users to define Key Performance Indicators that can be measured (or quantified) and monitored.  Think of quality by shift, energy usage by plant.  But is there more? 

Pinto Prognostications 2013 | Automation World

Some interesting  predictions from industry notable Jim Pinto.  Certainly, Invensys' foray into smart device-enabled mobile solutions (such as SmartGlance), cloud computing (tiered Historian, mobile reporting, and cloud-enabled BPM) are tangible deliverables that reinforce Jim's position. Pinto Prognostications 2013 | Automation World

Musings on the Cloud

I recently attended the Cloud Channel Summit in Silicon Valley.  The attendees represented leading software, hardware, systems and cloud hosting providers, as well as their channel—distributors, value-added resellers, systems integrators. Billed as a networking event to help build strategic alliances for a #cloud offering, it was apparent that the “cloud” and its ecosystem are still very much in a developmental stage.