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Busting the Silos Around Safety
 “In business and government everyone exists in silos,” says Michael Taubitz. “Production, Safety, Administration, Quality, and all the others. They have their own industry groups, their own issues, etc. But when you are designing you have to do that as a well integrated whole. You have to bust the damned silos.”
Taubitz, now retired, spent 43 years at General Motors, most of it working as the company's top safety standards executive says that this is especially important when it comes to safety standards. The alternative can be dramatically rising operational costs.
For example, he adds, “GM used to spend 10's of millions of dollars retrofitting brand new equipment because it didn't meet designated standards.“ That's not litigation or compensation in terms of an incident. That's just rebuilding something that wasn't done right in the first place.
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Special Edition Video Cast: Simplifying Machine-to-Machine Communications with Component Based Automation
 Hi, I'm Miles Budimir, Senior Motion Control Editor with Design World, with a special edition video-cast on the subject of Machine-to-Machine Interlocking.
Today we're going to be looking at an interesting technology for machine interlocking called Component Based Automation, or “CBA”
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Reduce Arc Flash Accidents Using Totally Integrated Automation
 According to a report compiled by Capelli-Schellpfeffer, Inc., five to 10 arc flash explosions happen in the USA every day, resulting in 1 to 2 deaths. Moreover, over the course of a seven-year study tracking electrical accidents conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2,576 U.S. workers died and another 32,807 were injured—losing an average of 13 days away from work—due to electrical shock or burn injuries.
Several years ago Henry was the maintenance manager at a large manufacturing facility.
He was married, had a very upbeat personality, a good position at the company, and was pleasant to be around. One day, Henry was trying to track down a low voltage problem and was conducting voltage measurements on a 4,160V to 480V dry type transformer on an upper level mezzanine. He took off the transformer cover, knelt down in front of it with a meter to test the 480V side and got the 4,160V side by mistake. The resulting arc flash explosion sent a fireball blasting out of the cabinet catching him in the torso and groin before rolling up his face
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Ethernet networking: The Values and the Pitfalls
 Industrial Ethernet has been the source of a great deal of discussion over the past few years. Proponents, and there are many, seem to believe it is the shop floor equivalent of a perfect world. Everything changes; you reduce—or even eliminate—cabling, you get more diagnostics, more control, it's cheaper, it's less proprietary.
Ethernet also has its opponents. They claim Industrial Ethernet is too new to be trusted on the plant floor, or that it's too expensive when compared to field bus technology. These are just a few of the misconceptions surrounding Industrial Ethernet.
To start with, Ethernet is not new. The basic technology has been around for more than 30 years and today's industrial offerings build on that foundation, adding key functionalities that provide the determinism, reliability and ease-of-use required for the plant-floor
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