Miami is a great place to spend part of February. Especially when you’re looking over the famed Blue Monster golf course at Doral.

 When it comes to minimizing waste and rejections, keeping up with the latest technology advances can look like a costly proposition.

  The industrial automation environment holds the potential for installation of wireless products throughout a factory or plant to yield vast arrays of information that can improve operations and profitability. Already widely deployed in commercial and business applications, industrial wireless adoption has been stalled, purportedly because process control users are slow to change and are paranoid about security. The real reasons for slow introduction are a combination of old-paradigm thinking, compounded by paralysis analysis through standards committees.

 Meticulous planning and sound business case analysis enhanced the chances of success.

 Think everything that can be automated has been automated? Think again

 In the United States, as in most other developed economies, there have been very few new manufacturing plants constructed in the last 20 years.

 Control system migration is a primary issue among many automation users today. Few new plants are being built, and capital expenditures continue to shrink.

 Have automation vendors hit the wall, when it comes to technology innovation?

 A few years ago I pulled a muscle at a physical performance test for soccer referees. Coming up lame was bad enough when you are trying to upgrade your rating, but it’s worse when it happens in front of all the best referees in the state.

 This issue of Automation World is devoted to all aspects of project management—from budgeting (p. 13), project management skills (p.

 Maybe it’s because I was in Orlando, but several of the speakers at a recent conference brought to mind a former attraction at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

 Manufacturers across virtually all industries have significantly cut information technology (IT) spending. They have also begun rationalizing the numerous applications that have been installed over the years, and have begun migrating from best-of-breed applications to solution suite providers such as IFS (www.ifsworld.com), SAP (www.sap.com), Oracle (www.oracle.com), PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com) and SSA (www.ssagt.com).

 Microsoft has taken great pains to clarify what .Net really means and how it will be critical to transforming its enterprise strategy.

 GE Fanuc Automation, Charlottesville, Va.-based affiliate of GE Industrial Systems (www.gefanuc.com), has aggressively entered the embedded computing space and leveraged the technology to upgrade its industrial automation offering.