With Siemens' announcement that it plans to acquire MES solution provider, Camstar, the company is making an emphatic statement that it continues to be very serious about integrating manufacturing operations and production execution into the PLM design/build lifecycle. In the MES solutions market space, Camstar represents a best-of-breed provider of MES solutions to the electronics, semiconductor, and medical device industries.

Manufacturers in both the process and discrete manufacturing industries should consider condition monitoring (CM) for critical assets to improve the effectiveness of their maintenance resources. Typical benefits include improved uptime, asset longevity, cost control, yield/quality and safety. Now is the time for users to re-evaluate their condition monitoring strategies and consider taking advantage of available packaged predictive maintenance (PdM) applications to leverage their existing process and smart device data.

Overview

It's hard to find a larger or more content-filled user group meeting that is totally focused on process automation than the Emerson Global Users Exchange. This year's week-long meeting at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center in Orlando attracted record attendance of over of 3,500 people. The meeting content spanned the entire spectrum of process automation, from sensors and equipment reliability to process control, safety, operations management, project execution, advanced control, and more.

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Inforum Event

The Inforum 2014 event was well attended with over 6,000 participants. New Orleans provided a nice venue. Infor provided several strategic and new product announcements.

Infor's Core Strategy

Infor has presented its strategy in previous events, and this Inforum was consistent. A summary of its strategy includes:

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If you want to find innovation in industrial controls, look at what is happening with engineering tools. The PLC/PAC market has matured in the past decade thanks to ultra-fast hardware and increasing use of commercial technologies (such as Ethernet) as the basis for industrial networks. At the same time, engineering tools have evolved to become integrated programming and configuration environments that rival the most sophisticated tools available to IT professionals.