I recently delivered a project where the goal was clear: keep an existing Siemens S7 environment running with hot failover while streaming alarm/events to a cloud analytics service — and do it without adding or swapping PLC hardware. Below I describe the pragmatic, production-proven approach I...
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Process Optimization
I remember the first time a new product family landed on my desk and the plant...
Industry 4.0
When a plant I worked with wanted to add cloud analytics and a lightweight...
Automation
I’ve long been frustrated by vendor lock‑in when trying to implement...
Sustainability
I recently led a retrofit program to install variable‑speed drives (VSDs)...
I’ve long been frustrated by vendor lock‑in when trying to implement high‑availability strategies across heterogeneous control systems. In practice you’ll often find a Siemens S7 island on one line and Rockwell ControlLogix on another, each...
I recently led a retrofit program to install variable‑speed drives (VSDs) across a mixed fleet of motors in a process plant. The project surprised some stakeholders: beyond the expected energy savings, retrofitting produced measurable reductions...
When a plant manager asks me "Can a lightweight digital twin halve setup time on a high‑mix line?", I give a deliberately pragmatic answer: maybe — if you define "lightweight" and "setup" clearly, design a tight validation plan, and focus on the...
When a plant manager asks me, “Which retrofit delivers the fastest ROI for motor drives across a mixed fleet — VFDs, soft starters, or variable torque control?” I don’t hand out a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead I walk through the...
When a supplier tells me they can reduce emissions by changing their batching strategy — for example moving from many small production runs to fewer larger batches — my immediate reaction is: great, but how will you prove it upstream so that my...
I’ve run dozens of pilots where the question wasn’t whether edge computing could be useful, but how to demonstrate, convincingly and quickly, that a vendor‑agnostic edge layer actually moves the needle on yield for legacy PLC lines. If your...
I still remember walking into a food‑packaging plant where compressed air was treated like free electricity: hoses left blowing, valves leaking, and large blow‑off devices used for product drying. The plant’s energy bill told one story, but...
I remember the first time I watched a collaborative robot (cobot) work beside an operator on a mixed-model assembly line — it was graceful, predictable, and quietly transformative. But turning one successful pilot into ten reliable,...
I recently worked on a mixed‑model assembly line that was consistently missing its OEE target despite relatively fast individual machines. The culprit was subtle: PLC scan cycles that ballooned unpredictably under certain model mixes, causing...
I recently worked on a line where the quality dashboard showed a sudden and persistent rise in defect counts without any corresponding change on the shop floor. Operators swore nothing had changed, SPC charts were flat, but the business was getting...