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Explore our library of brief, easy-to-read articles that share our expertise in solving various automation challenges and offer product suggestions to simplify your search. This section offers access to decades of application experience helping machine builders design and install efficient manufacturing systems.
We cover techniques to solve an automation problem, as well as help you in selecting products that support specific machine types. Find the topics that can give you a competitive edge with your projects here.
Automate to minimise food product recalls
The amount of product recalls leapt up during 2015. Robert Brooks argues that effective and integrated plant automation can play a lead role in minimising those costly and damaging recalls.
Production using serialised code based sorting by robots
Dennis Verhoeven, European Industrial Market Manager, Life Science at Omron, reviews how product personalisation is increasingly important in the food and beverage industry.
Technology helps machine builders offer improved availability
The ongoing pursuit of ever better OEE scores has become a real focus for end users in the food and beverage industry in recent years. OEE itself, however, is not a conversation end users routinely have with their machinery suppliers, with the focus instead tending to be on areas such as baseline speed, cycle times and overall performance.
Maximise your potential with data integration
How close is ‘Industry 4.0’ to being a reality? A futuristic, completely-connected industrial world is already taking shape, and data integration is a key enabler. Collecting and storing production data also offers many other rewards – from measuring OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) to helping OEMs meet increasing legal requirements for reporting. Dan Rossek takes a deeper look into the challenges and benefits of data integration in ‘From shop floor to top floor’.
Traceability through serialisation
The demand for greater traceability – to reduce counterfeiting and improve consumer information – presents growing challenges for manufacturers. How can serialisation help? In ‘Traceability through serialisation’ Dan Rossek focuses on what serialisation means today and shows why the flexible layer solution is better than the, seemingly easier, end-to-end solution.
New approach to machine control boosts performance
Can you add value to your machines, perhaps adding greater sophistication and complexity, without impacting on development time and programming cost? Robert Brooks looks at the evolution of a new breed of machine controllers.
Challenges in machine building
The ramping up of the low wage economies in the machine building sector means that OEMs often feel they are working under the shadow of the threat of cheap imports. In the first of a series of articles, Robert Brooks looks at the ‘must-have’ features that will keep UK machine builders ahead of the pack, and the opportunities to add even greater value.