Reducing production lead times to successfully compete in a global marketplace is a challenge for many UK manufacturers. As the world market leader in pneumatic components and control systems, SMC has pioneered the very latest wireless technology to help their customers achieve a competitive advantage – amongst the beneficiaries a world-leading manufacturer of print finishing equipment.

It is worth stating that implementing smart manufacturing is a very worthwhile exercise, successfully applying a level of smart manufacturing will bring greater efficiencies and flexibility to any given production process. It is also a significant step toward ‘futureproofing’ a production enterprise.

Depending on the era and application, industrial automation technology has been influenced by a wide variety of fieldbuses and protocols for connecting individual field devices and control systems since the 1980s. So far, these specific fieldbuses have satisfied the real time conditions of the relevant application while remaining incompatible with one another.

Telford based automated systems manufacturer Bauromat, one of Kawasaki Robotics leading integrators, has recently supplied and installed a robotic welding system to precision pressings and stampings experts Clamason Industries of Kingswinford.

Poka Yoke (the Japanese term for mistake-proofing) is used to describe pick-to-light systems for manual assembly work. Mitsubishi Electric has moved the concept several steps forward to create Guided Operator Solutions (GOS) that essentially use a controller-based system of active assembly instructions and sequenced parts supply from bins to help operators perform picking and assembly tasks faultlessly every time.

Affecting every industry globally the “Industrial Internet of Things” (IIoT) is the melding of digital, physical, and biological environments.

Why should we be happy to embrace Edge computing so soon after we got used to the cloud, IoT, Industry 4.0 etc…?