Machine Vision for Quality Inspection: A Practical Buyer’s Guide
I have lost count of how many times I have been called to a plant to look at a machine vision system that “stopped working.” In most cases, nothing actually broke. The camera is fine, the software is fine, and the cables are fine. What…
Digital Twin Technology in Manufacturing: Use Cases That Actually Deliver
Digital twin technology first earned my trust on a packaging line that kept jamming at the case erector. That was the first digital twin I ever built, and nobody on the floor could agree on why the line kept stopping. The maintenance team blamed the glue…
IT/OT Convergence: Bridging Office Systems and Factory Equipment
The first time I saw the real cost of skipping IT OT convergence, I was walking a plant floor as an integration lead and the production manager handed me a clipboard. On it was a handwritten tally of how many parts the line had made that shift. Upstairs,…
Industrial Network Design: Building Reliable Connectivity for the Plant Floor
The first time I watched a production line stop because of an industrial network problem, nobody in the room thought it was a network problem. The operators blamed the PLC. Maintenance, meanwhile, pointed at the drive. Our controls integrator suspected a…
What Makes a Smart Factory? Core Technologies and Realistic First Steps
A few years ago, the operations director at a plant building commercial water heaters walked me past what he called the first phase of his smart factory: a wall of new monitors. Each screen showed a live dashboard of spindle speeds, oven temperatures,…
Industrial IoT Basics: Connecting Machines Without Overhauling Your Floor
A few years back, a facilities manager walked me past a row of rotary screw compressors and a chiller that had been running since before most of his technicians finished high school. Then he said, half joking, “Corporate wants an industrial IoT…
Cloud Manufacturing: Moving Production Data Off-Premise Safely
A plant manager once told me, half joking, that his historian server was the most valuable thing in the building and also the one nobody wanted to touch. It sat in a closet near the maintenance office, running an operating system two versions past its…
Managed IT Services for Manufacturing: What to Outsource and What to Keep
Every manufacturing IT services decision I make today traces back to one phone call. It came at 2:40 on a Tuesday morning. A line lead on second shift could not pull work orders, and the label printers on packaging had also stopped talking to the server.…
Predictive Maintenance: How Sensors and Data Cut Unplanned Downtime
The worst calls I get as a predictive maintenance engineer come in the middle of the night. A few years back, I got one at 2:40 a.m. from a shift supervisor at a packaging plant. A main drive gearbox had seized, the line was dead, and the replacement was…
Industrial Automation in 2026: Where Mid-Sized Plants Should Start
Last month a plant manager called me on a Tuesday night, which is usually when the real calls come in. His company runs two shifts, employs about 180 people, makes three product families, and has a packaging line that had quietly become the bottleneck of…