With the start of 2013 we take a moment to anticipate what changes lie ahead for our industry and what impact they will have in the new year and beyond.  Have you considered the impact that Serialization will play?

Unlike our typical blog posts about our core business, I was recently sent this blog about Christmas Tree Safety Tips that I thought would be nice to share.  For those of our customers and partners that celebrate the Christmas Holiday, this blog offers some great safety tips about keeping your house safe. 

Support can mean many things depending on the context in which it is used.   If we look at support in a technical role it can be said its definition is to give strength to or maintain.   So in simple terms, we support what we sell or make.  Doesn’t everyone?   What sets them apart?

In the past few decades we have certainly benefited from many of the new materials, products, and engineering developments spun off from the NASA Space program. One in particular comes to mind. In 1959 NASA adopted the HACCP program with the cooperation of Pillsbury who had pioneered this approach to ensure the integrity of their food manufacturing processes. NASA was searching for the most effective way to protect the purity and safety of the food supply our astronauts would live on throughout their space journeys. The HACCP program filled the bill.

Recently I published the below article in Pharmaceutical Processing Magazine about the history, background and functionality of Manufacturing Execution Systems or MES.  We have seen in the past couple months an increased need within the industry to gain more insight, visibility and OEE.  More and more companies are looking  to MES for the solution.  In order to truly understand MES, you need to know it’s origins as well as its background.

When it comes to it, the human body perhaps represents the epitome of closed loop control.  No man made process comes even close to it, at least not for now! 

PIDs – A psychologists perspective.

Recently I had a very frustrating experience that is becoming more and more common.  A new client requested a quote for a small project but produced no written definition or instructions on scope of work, schedule or goals for the project.  The information came from a phone call and several e-mails with some existing drawings of the process flow.  Knowing that this information was not enough, I set up a meeting, traveled 5 hours one way to have a meeting and a quick tour of the area where this new project was going to be installed. The quick meeting was run by someone not involved with the project so the tour and verbalized scope of work turned out to be wrong, including the site location for the project. Thus all the information gathered was incorrect including my proposal for this project.  I had to make a second trip and redo my proposal.  I was told at the meeting I was bidding against another integrator and wondered what they were using for a scope of work.  If the economy was better, I would have probably “no bid” the first go around.  

I’m no deep thinker, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that time is a constant. That assumes you’re traveling less than the speed of light, which, given the pace of business in the 21^st century, is not a sure thing anymore. But since my understanding of physics is more in line with Newton than Einstein, we’re going to say time is constant.

As someone still relatively new to the corporate and professional world, I’ve received a lot of advice from well-meaning veterans of the trade. I’ve gotten advice on everything from the best way to program a PLC to how I should book my travel and what to wear to a client meeting. The best advice I have received up to this point actually came to me from a college professor, before I had even heard about the automation industry and Avanceon.