Clayton Christensen explains disruptive innovation as this: “It transforms a product that was historically so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it. Disruptive innovation makes it so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population have access to […]
Author Archive | Cormac Garvey
Preventing operational knowledge loss as key workers retire
Another interesting article on AutomationWorld (http://www.automationworld.com/mes-and-competitiveness) highlights the loss of key factory process insight when older generations retire. One way to prevent this loss is to map out the ‘as is’ business process workflow before the resources leave. Easier said than done of course. The attempt to extricate a lifetime of process knowledge from an impending […]
ExxonMobil challenges Automation software development process
Great blog post this week in Automation World outlining how a major oil producer plans to challenge the automation project engineering life cycle. Some of the more salient points are: Eliminate, simplify or automate steps in the overall automation execution.Minimize custom engineering.Shift the custom engineering to the software and rely on standard, not customized hardware […]
One vision of the future industrial automation software landscape
How can software development divorce hardware platform? There’s a lot to not be happy with regarding Industrial Automation software development, in comparison to our modern Internet software development colleagues. No automated unit testing. No equivalent of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) whereby software development is largely independent of the target hardware platform. Incomplete implementation of […]
Hannover Messe Report 2014
Hannover Messe showcases the world’s most innovative Industrial Automation companies every year and 2014 was no exception. There was more emphasis than ever on control systems integration and prototyping (notably ViProSim from OWL MaschineBau). Web client based SCADA is beginning to make its mark with both Thingworx and GTI Control exhibiting their web based SCADA […]