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Business Processes Integration |
Mondi Štˇetí a.s. a Štˇetí , Czech Republic, a business unit of the Mondi Group, produces 1,500 tons of pulp and paper daily, consuming more than a ton of logs per day. The facility is located about 25 miles north of Prague.
Developed by Motorola Inc. (www.motorola.com) in the 1980s as a problem-solving, defect-reduction methodology, Six Sigma changes business cultures.
They come with many names: variable frequency drives (VFDs), adjustable frequency drives (AFDs), adjustable speed drives (ASDs), speed drives, motor controllers, inverters or alternating current (AC) drives.
Lean Manufacturing, a process-management system created by Toyota Production Systems in the 1950s and 1960s, “supports profitable growth by improving productivity and quality, reducing lead times and freeing resources,” says Chet Marchwinski, communications director for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Lean Enterprise Institute Inc. (www.lean.org).
Smooth transfer of data from information technology (IT) to manufacturing and back can be key not just to production control, but also to customer success.
As energy prices soar, using NEMA Premium-labeled electric motors should be the proverbial no-brainer.
Tough economic times are ahead. Indeed, some companies have already faced some bumps. Others have realized that they need a change in direction to stay relevant in a changing economy. Whatever reason a company may have for change, one thing is clear—change won’t happen without the right kind of leadership.
No matter how fast, efficient, technologically advanced or well staffed any production process is, nothing matters much unless you acquire reliable operating data, preferably in real time, to understand how to maintain competitive manufacturing.
If most companies offer competitive benefits packages and support for further job-related education, then finding, hiring and keeping top-notch talent means a company must differentiate itself as a place where professionals desire to be.
Managing today’s manufacturing enterprise is impossible without collaboration.
Two application areas in which Coriolis flowmeters now arouse increasing attention are upstream oil-and-gas (O&G) processing and multi-phase flow.
“Version control is absolutely essential in any design and implementation of a manufacturing system. It’s a best practice,” declares Keith Jones, a marketing program manager with Wonderware Inc. (www.wonderware.com)
, a Lake Forest, Calif.-based automation software supplier.
“The general rule-of-thumb I’m seeing is this: ‘Capital spending is bad,’ ” says Neil Cooper, general manager of manufacturing and business operations for controls vendor Invensys Process Systems (www.ips.invensys.com), Plano, Texas.
Down in the lower levels of the seven-layer International Organization for Standardization’s (www.iso.ch) Open System Interconnection Reference Model, two bit-level buses compete to control devices such as actuators and sensors: the Actuator Sensor Interface (AS-I) and CompoNet.
Some may think the idea of manufacturing information flowing “from sensor to boardroom” may just be an unachievable dream. After all, the reality of manufacturing information is that there are a
multitude of different applications that each store information in
different ways and communicate using differing protocols and methods.
In a nonlinear world, the challenge of advanced loop tuning is to keep continuous and batch processes, as well as discrete operations, functioning cleanly and productively without unplanned downtime.
The proliferation of digital networks in manufacturing has resulted in a job description change for most, if not all, automation engineers.
“OEE is one of the most recognized KPIs (key performance indicators), if not the most recognized,” observes Craig Resnick, a research director at ARC Advisory Group Inc., in Dedham, Mass.
We keep hearing that all you need to do to retain younger employees is
give them more money, and that older employees are easy to retain
because they have everything they want. But our research showed that
those stereotypes arenít accurate; employees of all ages are motivated
by the same factors at work.
Whether training comes by downloadable Web-based study-at-your-own-pace videos, one-hour Web-based seminars called Webinars, single-day classroom sessions or week-long intensive classroom courses, trainers’ goals remain essentially the same: Be effective, impart what students need and get feedback to improve the training.
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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