Improving productivity involves the whole of the value chain, not just production. The value chain is a set of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs to deliver a valuable product or service to the market. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits. The manufacturing value […]
Improving productivity combats rising material costs. UK manufacturing can expect to face a challenging few years as it adjusts to life alongside the European Union. Report after report has identified low productivity as a key challenge for all manufacturers. The recent weakness in the value of the Pound will help exporters, but to […]
Ethernet and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is driving manufacturing convergence with integration between the plant floor and the wider enterprise. Open communications from machine to machine and device to device are becoming commonplace. Now offering Gigabit speeds and deterministic response, it may seem there is nothing that Ethernet can’t do. Impact of […]
Opportunities for increasing efficiency while at the same time reducing energy consumption are a frequently discussed topic, not least in the food industry, where productivity and profit margins tend to be low compared with other manufacturing industries. Pressure is also growing on prices in the bakery market, driven primarily by direct competition with […]
When Industrial Ethernet became widely available, it was assumed it would quickly consign fieldbus networks to the pages of history. That has not happened, so when should you migrate from fieldbus networks to Industrial Ethernet? The first point to remember is that Industrial Ethernets are generally not compatible with each other and any decision […]