This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) follows the theme of “embracing equity” — focusing on giving fair opportunities for everyone to succeed. An example of a business invested in its people is, Sandvik Coromant, here highlighting the experience of their President, Helen Blomqvist. One of IWD’s key missions is to […]
By Alex Mosher, Senior Vice-President of Global Enablement at Armis The business needs of Operational Technology (OT) environments are rapidly evolving where systems are increasingly connected to both enterprise networks and externally to the internet, exposing them to new and emerging cyber threats. This means that security becomes strategically important […]
Nathan Knight, Hitachi Vantara’s Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, makes the case for a coordinated approach to decarbonisation and digitalisation Imagine that manufacturers have a character on each shoulder, one with the word PROGRESS emblazoned across its chest, and the other, SUSTAINABILITY. When deciding where to invest precious […]
Jornt Moerland, Regional Vice President APAC of Mendix. Business leaders have been losing sleep in face of various challenges within the manufacturing industry. Decreasing production output, labour shortages, ongoing supply chain disruptions and inflation are just a few to be named. As noted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, almost […]
By Sebastian Krueger, Vice President APAC, Paessler Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution. Digitisation is transforming the world in ways people a few decades ago would have hardly imagined. You hail a taxi ride to take you to the best restaurant in town using your smartphone and get […]
By Vinay Samuel, Founder and CEO, Zetaris The success of any manufacturing business depends on closely managing every element of the process. That starts with accessing raw materials, monitoring the actual process of manufacturing, the dispatch of finished goods and ensuring they are shipped to the customer. The key to […]
Siemens, a leading supplier in the field of automation and industrial software, cooperates with Nissan to build production lines for the new all-electric crossover Nissan Ariya at the company’s plant in Tochigi, Japan. Both companies build on their long-standing cooperation. Nissan had already been using the Siemens Digital Industries software […]
By Roger Landman, Head of Product Management at SYSPRO The fabricated metals industry inherently runs on very slim margins due to factors like fluctuating material costs, direct and indirect labour and overhead expenses. Global raw material costs are often dictated by the London Metal Exchange (LME), the largest exchange for […]
By Alessandro Chimera TIBCO’s director of digitalisation strategy The way we use data to monitor and control manufacturing systems has changed. TIBCO’s director of digitalisation strategy, Alessandro Chimera, explains the shape of the anomaly economy guiding operational performance management in manufacturing. “A stitch in time saves nine” is a well-known […]
While IoT has transformed industry, there are still challenges when it comes to streamlining deployment. Here, Amr Houssein, managing director of eSIM pioneer Mobilise, explains how eSIMs complete IoT connectivity. In short, the industrial IoT (IIoT) enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, making manufacturing facilities smart and digitalised. By using sensors to […]
Companies believe smart manufacturing is key to their business’ future success, The State of Smart Manufacturing Report reveals. Plex Systems, a Rockwell Automation company in cloud-delivered smart manufacturing solutions, has announced the results of its 7th annual study, “The State of Smart Manufacturing Report.” The research reveals that smart manufacturing […]
The latest release of Siemens’ NX software, brings greater electronic co-design, collaboration, and intelligence capture and reuse capability. These empower engineering executives across every industry to find productivity improvements and greater efficiencies in their engineering departments. Part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of software and services, NX delivers productivity and […]
Unplanned downtime is a manufacturer’s worst nightmare. The nightmare worsens if goods on the idle production line are perishable food and beverages, as too much of a delay can lead to product losses. Manufacturing lines are complex systems made of thousands of parts, each doing their own important job. If one part fails, this has a cascading effect up and down the production line, to the extent that production may come to a complete halt. When this occurs, there are two options: perform a repair on the broken part, or replace or upgrade the entire system. While system upgrades have their own merits, they are expensive and entail large windows of undesirable, costly downtime while old systems are removed and new ones are installed and commissioned. The alternative approach is to replace the broken part, which sounds simple and should be much quicker than replacing the entire system. However, if the offending part turns out to be obsolete — that is, no longer manufactured by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) — then a quick task suddenly becomes more difficult. This is because quality obsolete parts are notoriously difficult to source so, if manufacturers are not prepared in advance, they may find themselves having to shut down production for much longer than initially anticipated. Furthermore, if corners are cut to find cheaper replacements, or if parts are bought simply because they were the easiest to find, manufacturers are liable to incur repeated downtime as lower-quality parts are likely to fail again, and quickly. As industrial systems typically have long lifespans, they are especially susceptible to broken parts, and are more likely to contain obsolete parts. That is why it’s important to have a comprehensive obsolescence plan in place. Obsolescence audit An effective obsolescence plan should involve a full systems audit, to […]