Today's automation technologies and methodologies can boost an industrial organization's operational efficiencies, but only if properly under-stood, implemented, and utilized. At the 19th Annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida this month, Cliff Pederson of Pederson Enterprises, Inc. and Yahya Nazer of The Dow Chemical Company, presented several approaches for efficient and effective automation implementation.
The Indian information technology (IT) services continues its upward momentum as most of the IT services companies covered in the report exhibited above-average growth. In this report, we analyze the third quarter of financial year 2014-15 of the Indian IT sector and compare it with same period the previous year.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is driving transformation in how machine builders deliver maintenance and support services. Connecting smart machinery to the Internet in a secure manner enables machine builders to remotely monitor the condition and performance of their customers' machinery on a continuous basis. IIoT also enables machine builders to apply analytics for adaptive control and predictive maintenance. With this remote, continuous monitoring by experts, the manufacturers that depend on the machinery should realize increased machine availability and performance.
Automation suppliers saw their revenues grow by about 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, and closed out the year with slightly under 5 per-cent in revenue gains. Suppliers to the process industries posted slower growth than in past quarters, while discrete suppliers continued to bene-fit from stronger investment activity in the electronics and automotive industries in Asia and North America. Japanese suppliers continued to gain disproportionate benefit from a weaker yen and a resurgence in domestic plant investments, after enduring many lean years.
By ARC Industrial Internet of Things Team
Executive Overview
While significant hurdles must still be overcome, operating companies and oilfield services companies alike should not dismiss the performance improvements promised by emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions. The potential operational and business process improvements and cost reductions that can be unleashed through enhanced instrumentation, connectivity, and analytics in upstream oil & gas promise to be more than sufficient to overcome the obstacles.
A half-day workshop at the 2015 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) included discussions on three initiatives: Industrie 4.0, the Industrial Internet Consortium, and the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition. In the first part, Dr. Reinhold Achatz, member of the steering committee of "Platform Industrie 4.0," presented the organization's vision.
The profitability of the European electric utilities has suffered drastically over the last years, as have investments. However, ARC Advisory Group believes that the boom in renewables and other "green" power generation technologies will continue even as the first generation of wind turbines face replacement amid decreasing demand. However, many opportunities exist for market participants and technology suppliers alike in this challenging market.
Safety of field personnel is the highest priority for process manufacturers. However, the enormous size of many plants and the growing complexity of their field operations leaves most plants struggling to improve field safety and emergency procedures beyond past practice.
In an abnormal or accident situation, three questions always become critical: Are people in any danger or risk? Where are our people? If all are not accounted for, where and when were those missing last seen?
This week, ARC Advisory Group held its 19th Annual Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida. The event drew more than 700 participants from approximately 300 different companies and 25 countries. The theme for this year's Forum, "Industry in Transition: The Information-driven Enterprise for the Connected World," resonated well with attendees, many who are currently trying to get a handle on the latest Internet-enabled automation and information technologies and determine if and how they can enable competitive advantage.
While Apple didn't invent multi-touch technology, the Apple iPhone, introduced in 2007, certainly went a long way toward popularizing the technology. "Multi-touch," is the ability for a touchscreen display to sense input from two or more points of contact simultaneously, which enables users to interact with the device using relative complex finger gestures such as pinching the screen to zoom in, spreading the screen to zoom out, plus wiping, rotating, and other "man-machine" interactions.