For Hero’s management team, the challenge is to maintain and improve the company’s status as the market leader for quality food products. This attention to detail at the company’s main factory in Alcantarilla, in southern Spain, led to its association with Rockwell Automation to deliver secure and profitable manufacturing production solutions.

  Recent advancements in vibration monitoring and data analysis have lead to condition monitoring systems that can accurately detect a problem before failure, thus reducing costly machine shutdowns and maximizing production output.

  Finding the right components within a system that will cause the least amount of downtime and maintenance is no easy task: make the most informed decision.

 Thomas J. Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, reports on the OPC events held during the recent Hannover Fair in Germany. Demonstrations and forums solidify OPC UA’s success as the key integration technology for legacy control devices and systems.

 MatrikonOPC’s tools improve the return on process historian assets by providing a standardized mechanism for data collection and supporting multi-vendor analysis solutions.

 Despite the vulnerability of Microsoft Windows and DCOM to cyber attack, network security and OPC can coexist, if plant and business systems are configured and maintained correctly. Innovative solutions, such as the MatrikonOPC Tunneller, can help.

 A highlight of the recent OPC Unified Architecture Developers Conference was the OPC UA demonstration that was implemented with Microsoft’s Indigo framework and was jointly developed by Cactus Commerce, the OPC Foundation and Microsoft.

 For a month packed with activities, Thomas J. Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, discusses the OPC buzz at Hanover Fair, the OPC UA Developers Conference, held at the Microsoft campus, and the OPC Interoperability Workshop, held in Tampa, Florida.

 A leading forest industry company uses OPC to communicate between the control system and the mill information system in the production of high-gloss paper.