Frank O Smith for Control Engineering
Articles
Plant Automation and Supply Chain Execution Converge
Manufacturers' increasing integration of automation and enterprise technologies are being used for a variety of purposes, from production margin optimization to strategic energy efficiency decisions.
When eBOMs and mBOMs converge
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a business strategy that helps companies share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products across the extended enterprise. As such, PLM software has gained the stature of being “the next big thing” in manufacturing enterprise information systems, assuming the mantle that ERP (enterprise ...
The Power of Real Time Intelligence
Real time control is not just for the factory floor. It has begun to appeal to enterprise management wanting to gain competitive advantage. While very few organizations are there yet, the ones who are have the capacity to do things that have never been done before.
Anatomy of Steam Plant
Sasolburg, South Africa, is home to one of the world's only viable coal-derived oil refineries. It is also the headquarters of Sasol, a diversified petrochemical, mining, and energy company. Looking to achieve the next level of control over its vast operations, Sasol asked representatives from Invensys, a global industrial automation, transportation and controls vendor, to explain more about it...
Asset Management and the Search for Actionable Intelligence
Mike Brooks, staff technologist for global refining at Chevron, has been tasked with planning the next generation IT infrastructure for Chevron’s worldwide operations. He’s wrestling with the technical aspects in order to engineer contextualized business value arising from combining data and information from multiple operational domains.
Digital Manufacturing Takes Off
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software could be coming to a control system near you. Maybe not to tomorrow, but given recent developments, sooner than you might suspect. The link from PLM directly into the controls layer is an emerging trend that presents yet another challenge — and opportunity — for control engineering professionals.
Building Bridges to the Enterprise
A convergence of business pressures is creating a perfect storm of circumstances set to alter the role and function of control engineering in the plant. Control engineering's historic charter, to ensure the safe and efficient operation of the plant, has kept it an island unto itself for years. Automation equipment and systems—and the data they generated—were primarily for use by aut...