Articles and News

Opto 22 supports the manufacture of materials and products needed for essential medical supply chains, transportation, energy, communications, food and agriculture, chemical manufacturing, nuclear facilities, the operation of dams, water and wastewater treatment, emergency services, and the defense industrial base, all deemed vital by CISA

As more experienced workers retire from the manufacturing workforce, the sector faces a future with a growing skills gap and a greater number of unfilled jobs.

Richard “Rich” Jesse Merritt died Saturday, February 8, 2020, at his home in Cedar Rapids. He was 76. He was a giant of industrial automation and control technical communications, serving countless publications and clients over his long career, including Automation.com and ISA’s InTech magazine.

By Louis Columbus To stay competitive, manufacturers must continually reinvent themselves and find new ways to improve—whether by delivering differentiated products, controlling costs, or improving quality.

Members of the annual Pharmaceutical Automation Roundtable (PAR) held October 2019 reflect on workforce skills, training, certification and development.

The competition finals, held at the Hyatt Regency Washington in Washington, D.C., is organized by DiscoverE and sponsored in part by Bentley. Sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade students from 1,500 schools in more than 40 regions, as well as teams from Canada, have imagined, designed, and built cities for the 2019-2020 Future City Competition.

TMHNA announced the recipients of grant funding during a joint press conference at MODEX 2020 held in conjunction with Material Handling Institute (MHI).

Experiential learning is increasingly accepted as the most effective way to develop competency for both operators and field workers. To build truly effective operations, though, we need to bring them together.

The Facility Management & Maintenance Library features 69 courses in 3D specifically designed to train facility managers, building engineers and maintenance technicians of commercial buildings.

This article discusses how automated guided vehicles have advanced from simple materials handlers to intelligent autonomous robots.

HANNOVER MESSE 2020 has been postponed to the week of 13 to 17 July. Deutsche Messe AG is thus responding to global developments related to the Coronavirus.

To maintain a constant (rated) flux density, the applied voltage must also be changed in the same proportion as the frequency (per Faraday’s law).

When machines run 24/7, with or without supervision, their components can wear out quickly. This article explains the potential of lights-out manufacturing.

ISO 9000 is a family of international quality management systems standards designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders while meeting statutory an

ISA past president Paul Gruhn, PE, CFSE, will be presenting at local meetings around the country during the first quarter of 2020. As a global functional safety consultant with aeSolutions, Gruhn has gained extensive experience consulting with sites around the world.

Through his experience on numerous projects, Kuusman has acquired a breadth of knowledge in the company’s systems and site work management, which he now brings to this new role. Namely, he will be responsible for leading the Cimcorp U.S. office in Norcross, Georgia, guiding its strategic growth and quality of customer service and after-sales support.

Talk of Industry 4.0 has been useful in helping businesses understand the value of industrial automation and connectivity. This article explains why it’s not only vital to work with a systems integrator to get the most from industrial connectivity, but to also take a grounded approach.

Slip is usually expressed as a percentage, and varies by motor, from nominally 0.5 percent for very large motors to about 5 percent for small, specialized motors..

The poster deals with the basics of EtherCAT technology, the EtherCAT Device Protocol (EDP), and provides a visual overview of EtherCAT. It describes the basic functional principles of EtherCAT, the structure of the frame and its processing in the EtherCAT Slave Controller (ESC).

A recent industry survey by NTMA through found that more than 90% of manufacturers are struggling to fill open positions. Other data show that the number of job openings in manufacturer is expected to grow even more in the next decade if there is not a significant investment in skills training.