… To be perfect is to change often. -Winston Churchill.
With each PROFINEWS edition, the news changes and becomes ever more engaging. For example, later this month at the SPS/IPC/Drives tradeshow in Nuremberg, prepare for some exciting announcements from PI. In the meantime, I want to point out a few highlights in this issue.
The first is the interest we’re seeing for PROFIBUS and PROFINET from multi-national, billion-dollar companies. Just in Brazil alone, a major beer brewer and a large energy company are investing in the technologies. To find out whom though, you’ll have to read the article! It is a fascinating shift to witness and be party to.
When end-user companies standardize on a network technology, it goes straight towards their bottom line. Vendors using the standard compete for the end-user’s business and innovate accordingly. Everybody wins. Picking the right technology is key.
For a long time now, the talk around IIoT has been about moving data upward and outward from the manufacturing environment. But once that information is analyzed, changes can only be implemented if the manufacturing environment is flexible. That is why, for the past few months we’ve been talking a lot about using PROFINET not just as a manufacturing automation network, but also as a network within the manufacturing machines themselves. PROFINET enables flexible machine concepts through a myriad of features. Again, you’ll have to read the article to find out more!
Thank you for taking the time to read this issue of PROFINEWS, there’s a lot more than what’s been highlighted here.