Manufacturing

I recently took part in a plant tour with a manufacturer in the early days of modernizing its plant floor. Two decades old, this factory had always relied on manual data collection. The team hand-carried operational data back to the office to be correlated and analyzed. Then they would make improvem…

Are you an Embedded IT manufacturing professional (An IT person who also works in operations) and you’re headed to Cisco Live in Las Vegas June 25-29, 2017 at Mandalay Bay?  You need to swing by the Manufacturing demos in the IoT and Industry District in the World of Solutions to learn how Cisco can…

In your everyday life, it’s hard to miss the impact of wireless. We’re no longer tethered to our desktop computers or corded home phones. Our music now streams wirelessly on our headsets or in our cars. And when you’re looking at wireless platforms, you have lots of options—such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,…

There has been a lot of discussion lately around why IoT projects fail. Many projects stall at the proof of concept (POC) phase, and only about a quarter of these investments are considered a success.  With these setbacks however, there are some notable achievements as well. As part of our factory o…

What comes to mind when you think of Durham, North Carolina?  If you’re like most people, it’s probably one of three things: minor league baseball, Duke basketball, or tobacco. The 1988 film Bull Durham cemented the town’s notoriety and the Durham Bulls as one of the most famous minor league f…

Friday, May 12 looked like a typical day for most folks as they went into work looking to finish off their day and head into the weekend. But as the day progressed, many organizations across the globe quickly realized that their TGIF was going to be spent dealing with a ransomware attack known as Wa…

We wrapped up the Hannover Messe event at the end of April in Hannover, Germany, and I can say one thing – Wow!  The official numbers are still not in, but there were an estimated 225,000+ attendees, 6500 vendors, 2,500 journalists from all over the world , and 5 full days of exhibits.  This is the…

Last week in Germany, we attended the Hannover Messe event, where the hot topics were three new products officially announced at the show: Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) for deterministic Ethernet is now available on our IE4000 switch to support a single unified architecture on the plant floor. In…

At the 2017 Hannover Messe this week, I talked with dozens of manufacturing execs trying to figure out how to move forward their platforms, teams, and philosophies to enable Industrie 4.0 outcomes at scale. Our customers are already connecting thousands of intelligent devices and demanding new trans…