Articles and News

Spiesshofer will succeed Joe Hogan as CEO on September 15, 2013. Hogan will continue with ABB for some months as Senior Advisor to the Board.

$372.50 million in orders were down 26.6% from March and down 12.6% when compared with the total of $426.44 million reported for April 2012.

By Reid Schook Rockwell Automation is controlling the HVAC system at an unnamed oil company in the Athabasca Oil Sands region in Canada.

Prosoft lets each PLC on SkySurfer communicate with the Allen-Bradley MicroLogix 1100 master PLC on the flight deck. The master PLC has an HMI connected to it so an operator can start a cart and monitor data.

By Bill Lydon, Editor In February 2013, Schneider Electric announced the PlantStruxure PES (Process Expert System) as, “The innovative Process Automation System that brings together the best from the PLC/SCADA and DCS worlds and combines this with integrated energy management features…” To gain a better understanding, I had the opportunity to ask their Product Marketing Manager some questions about this new offering.

Microchip delivered the 12 billionth MCU approximately 10 months after delivering its 11 billionth.

On the heels of Joe Hogan's departure, Chief Technology Officer, Prith Banerjee, has decided to leave ABB for family reasons.

Hogan will continue to lead ABB until a successor is announced. He is committed to a smooth transition.

Wilkinson has over 14 years’ experience in the industry having worked for some of the world’s leading control systems manufacturers including Honeywell, Siemens and Rockwell Automation.

ITS will upgrade nine Siemens S5 PLC Water Distribution Systems with Siemens S7 equipment in the QAB and Formulation 1 plants at AstraZeneca’s Macclesfield site in the UK.

By Bill Lydon, Editor At the recent Manufacturing in America Symposium, hosted by Siemens and Electro-Matic, automation professionals from Ford and General Motors shared their perspectives on a number of automation issues including the lack of engineers, data connectivity, integrated safety, demands on global suppliers, and much more.

Orders totaled $385.89 million, up 5.7% from January but down 10.6% when compared with the total of $431.63 million reported for February 2012.

Bosch Rexroth won the award for its Open Core Engineering project, which unites the previously separate worlds of programmable logic controllers (PLC) and information technology (IT).

PLCopen and its members published PLCopen Safety Part 4 safety specification, specific to the application of presses.

PLC Checker website is a static code analyzer and collaborative cloud application, used to enhance the quality of PLC programs.

January U.S. manufacturing technology orders totaled $370.62 million, down 26.5% from December and down 12.2% reported in January 2012.

The Summit, being held June 24 - 27, will provide professionals with end user automation learning opportunities - from process and discrete to motion control and drives.

Crouzet will use Netbiter as a remote management solution for their Millenium 3 Smart PLCs, allowing users access to data on field equipment over the web.

By Bill Lydon, Editor I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Moret, Senior Vice President at Rockwell Automation. Other than their process control initiatives, we discussed networks, energy monitoring, embedded controllers, regenerative energy and their services business.

User Guidelines contain easy-to-understand application examples and show how to create user-derived function blocks to add to a company specific library, improving the reusability of the application programs.