We have four members’ updates this month: GE Intelligent Platforms customer gets easy upgrade to PROFINET.  PI and PI North America member PROCENTEC announces the opening of a new office in Italy. Softing provides a white paper on Best Practice in PROFIBUS Network Diagnostics and a success story for PROFIBUS diagnostics. Industrie 4.0 and cyber-physical systems are the topics of a position paper from halstrup-walcher.

GE Intelligent Platforms

GE Intelligent Platforms customer DVL has been an innovative leader in applying redundant PLC systems to the most demanding critical and reliable power applications for more than two decades. Often, these applications need to be “fault-tolerant” and “self-healing”. This means that a failure of any component, or disconnection or cut of any power, control or communication line would not cause a loss of power situation.  They were able to easily upgrade their older PLCs to new with PROFINET.  Read the whole story.

PROCENTEC

PROCENTEC, service provider and knowledge partner in the field of PROFIBUS and PROFINET technology, today announced it is opening a new office in Brescia, northern Italy, to enter the Italian PROFIBUS and PROFINET market.

Plans to develop operations in Italy were initiated by the growth of the Italian industrial automation market. The new office, which includes Sales activities, will be PROCENTEC’s third office. PROCENTEC will offer its Italian customers innovative, tailor-made solutions to allow them to operate successfully in the field of industrial automation.

According to Pieter Barendrecht, Managing Director at PROCENTEC HQ in the Netherlands: “An additional local branch in Europe is a natural choice for our international development strategy. We are investing resources in the Italian market, because of its huge potential.” Italy is the second largest European market for industrial automation and this market has effectively grown by 5% in 2014, reaching an overall volume of 4 billion Euro and is still increasing.

Evelyn Mario, the new Managing Director of PROCENTEC Srl, is enthusiastic about this new challenge: “I have known PROCENTEC for many years and I’ve always been impressed by their technological innovations and their robust network of experts and distributors. Their strength is the enduring research and development of new products, along with an outstanding level of expertise combined with the human factor.” The new Italian branch will be responsible for developing and supporting the PROFIBUS and PROFINET market in Italy and Italian Switzerland for the entire range of PROCENTEC products and services. Brescia has been chosen for its significant location, being well positioned in the northern Italian industrial region.

Softing

Softing’s whitepaper “Best Practice in PROFIBUS Network Diagnostics” talks about ways to detect PROFIBUS malfunctions at an early stage to ensure smooth network communication.  PROFIBUS is the digital fieldbus technology with the highest distribution worldwide, providing advantages for all types of applications.  Register and download the paper here.

“Due to intermittent issues I was forced to stop the production line multiple times, sometimes for hours. The resulting cost in lost revenue was substantial.” Paul Hall, Process Control and IT Manager, N.R. Spuntech Industries.  Read how he solved the mystery shutdown issues here.

halstrup-walcher

Positioning systems have their place in Industrie 4.0 and IIoT.  As a component of cyber-physical systems they help to achieve small lot sizes.  Read more.