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In determining an item’s added value, find out if value is in quantity—just meeting demand—or in quality. Supplier relationship management (SRM) has begun its comeback, believes Rich Parker, the Minneapolis-based vice president of global marketing for Infor (www.infor.com), a provider of enterprise business solutions. Successful application of machine vision into an automation system requires proper setup of the vision system and integration with other automation components. A new third-generation input/output (I/O) bus—PCI (peripheral component interconnect) Express, from Santa Clara, Calif.-headquartered Intel Corp. A Google search for the phrase “help desk outsourcing” produces more than a million hits in a fraction of a second. While that punctuates how help-desk outsourcing has grown, help-desk service providers must still prove they can provide around-the-clock, expert-accessible, immediate service that clients demand. Executive Vice President Pierre (Pete) Aubrey, of Ottawa, Canada-based ShapeGrabber Inc. (www.shapegrabber.com), was looking for some outsourced information technology (IT) support for his customers in the United States. Conducting a meeting by telephone offers wide but shallow value for business users—wide, because of its near ubiquitous reach, shallow, because the visual element of communications is lacking. End-users, vendors and standards organizations say, and his own experience confirms, that demand for device-level implementation of Ethernet is exploding, says Larry Komarek, manager for automation controls at Harrisburg, Pa.-based Phoenix Contact Inc. The technology known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, involves the conversion of analog voice signals into IP data packets that can be transmitted over the Internet and other data networks. Not all that long ago, companies began to realize that getting rid of paper-based purchasing could save them money. Executives discovered that electronic procurement could eliminate human errors and speed up business processes, allowing them to improve margins, gain efficiencies and preserve relationships with suppliers that are an integral part of business. Whether used to measure gold, printed circuit boards (PCBs), bagels, penguins or National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronauts—weigh scales are essential for life and manufacturing. If you find that transmitting clear signals is a problem for your wireless data transmitters, you’re not alone. Getting consistent signals is a common complaint that users have about wireless transmitters. Expect the unexpected. That should be your motto if you have financial responsibility for automation. Recurring failures that begin without warning could take you by surprise and force you to replace some aging equipment quickly to prevent the failures from affecting your just-in-time operations. Although most companies are willing to invest in training and building a skilled workforce, their biggest complaint has been difficulty in finding meaty courses and seminars for a reasonable dollar. They increase productivity. They supply information inside and outside of the enterprise—and across firewalls. They do so with ease, reliability and security. Embedded computing is the very foundation of control, while control systems are the cornerstones of automation systems. Within these systems lie the intelligence to control processes and machines, and provide information in “real time” essential for the smooth operation of enterprise business systems. It’s 2 a.m. and a process line abruptly shuts down. The problem appears to be a controller, but no one is sure. Whatever it is, no one can fix it. Many companies are connecting internal manufacturing equipment directly to external support specialists. When William P. Gaut Jr. traveled to Atlanta recently for industrial product training, he took with him some samples of a float-and-gasket assembly used in one of his company’s medical device products, as well as a copy of the software program he was using for machine vision inspection of those assemblies.
indicates a sponsored article that was submitted directly to this Web site by the supplier, and was not handled by the AW editorial staff.
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