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The scaling of efficiencies and business value from automation and the Internet of Things (IoT) over the past few years has been transformative. In factories especially, costs drop, waste decreases, and businesses can control and gain insight into their processes like never before.

For a company willing to start digital transformation, it is paramount to assess readiness and maturity.

This article discusses how the principles of IoT-enabled self-healing are becoming integral to network device design and management, promising more resilient network operations.

As digital transformation advances throughout manufacturing organizations, incorporating advanced process analytics technologies into continuous improvement programs will foster a process optimization culture and increase employee engagement.

Digital transformation is about creating the structure to manage what’s already in place, measure what’s working and scale what delivers value.

The 6ES7517-3FP00-0AB0, part of the SIMATIC S7-1500 series, is a powerful fail-safe controller designed for advanced automation applications.

Interact Analysis tracked the R&D investments of dozens of key publicly-listed companies worldwide.

The practical advantage of functional safety is that it allows machines to keep working safely, rather than stopping by default.

The reshoring of manufacturers to the U.S. presents significant cyber risk challenges and opportunities.

By Fulvio Roveta, Integration Objects Article discusses some of the options available for integrating automation islands and for distributing information at any level in the organization. In particular, two main players in the system integration arena will be examined: OLE for Process Control (OPC) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

In this entry in the Ask the Automation Pros blog series, the pros answer the question of how to get the most knowledge from a data historian.

Automation.com, June 2011 By J. Timothy Shea, VDC Research Group VDC Research partnered with Automation.com to conduct an extensive initiative into the market for wireline and wireless industrial networking infrastructure product markets. Recent research found that the demand outlook for wireline and wireless industrial networking infrastructure products will be quite healthy through 2015.

By Pat Garrehy, Rootstock What you should know before selecting your Cloud ERP solution. If an organization is considering a Private Cloud ERP vendor, it needs to undertake some comprehensive analysis to be assured that this vendor can satisfy all of their business requirements.

Automation.com, November 2011 By Eric Byres, Byres Security Inc. On one hand, industry is becoming increasingly concerned about just how vulnerable control systems have become to outside attacks. At the same time, new tools and applications that improve efficiency, but increase that exposure, are appearing daily. So must we sacrifice these gains in efficiency if we want to be secure?

By Jim O’Callaghan, EnOcean Energy harvesting wireless technology stems from a simple observation – where sensor data resides, sufficient ambient energy exists to power sensors and radio communications. Harvestable energy sources include: motion, indoor light and temperature differentials.

Study says over the next five years, the United States, Germany and Japan will be challenged to maintain their competitive edge against China, India and Brazil.

Over the next five years, manufacturing stalwarts like the United States, Germany and Japan will be challenged to maintain their competitive edge.

Automation.com, June 2012 By Chris Jones, Micro-Epsilon UK EtherCAT has established itself within the market as a communications standard that can offer true real time capabilities in automation technology. Micro-Epsilon has developed sensors and controllers with EtherCAT capability, enabling them to be smoothly integrated into existing control and automation networks.

Automation.com, May 2010 By Mark Howard, Zettlex A key step in selecting a suitable position sensor for an application is to be absolutely clear about what is needed, particularly with respect to sensor resolution, repeatability and linearity.

Automation.com, May 2011 By Bill Lydon, Editor Here are a few highlights from ABB Automation & Power World 2011. The event attracted a record number of participants, totaling more than 4,200, and featured over 400 educational workshops and hands-on training sessions, over 45 customer-presented case studies, and an exhibition of ABB and partner products.