IEN: How are manufacturers using existing technologies in new ways?

Neo: Adlink, as a manufacturer of PC based IO and control products, has always been looking at various ways of utilizing and innovating existing technologies as the fundamental design approach in all our new products offerings.Our goals are simple:

• To solve real-world problems for the people we serve by applying innovations to existing technologies they are familiar with.


• Using existing technologies; to offer "openness" instead of being proprietary, enhancing users' comfort level and acceptance when new products are introduced.

One major challenge in the real world has always been to increase productivity. And productivity means increased units per hour (UPH) in most cases.

We are constantly being requested to offer products with better feature sets and the major request has always been to increase speed. It has therefore been our basic innovation principle to take into consideration pushing the "Speed" limit when we are designing our new products. We have always been pushing the speed limit with existing technologies. For example, in serial communication, we are the first to push remote data acquisition modules using RS485 serial communications to speeds of 384K, when 115K was mainstream. We have enhanced the data communications rate to 6MBPS for RS422 serial communications with our latest high speed link distributed IO products. At the same time, we incorporated and used existing category 5 cabling scheme from Ethernet technology as the wiring scheme for high speed serial communications. The approach allows the benefits of readily available wiring components with tremendous cost savings.

IEN: What are the major concerns facing this sector in the next few years?

Neo: The following are the major concerns faced not only by us but also by our clients:

1. Higher performance/throughput
2. Lowered costs
3.Consistency in quality
4. Connectivity
5. Simplicity in solutions.

IEN: What innovations are in store for users?

Neo:

• High speed serial communications offering fast, real time, simple I/O solutions


• Gigabit in industrial Ethernet at least a year from now


• Wireless -- industrial Bluetooth.

IEN: How are software and equipment being integrated in today's HMI/MMI world?

Neo: First, migration from standalone proprietary solutions to PC-based control solutions. It makes the most sense: since HMI/MMI packages have to be loaded into a computer, why not add the IO, data acquisition, vision, and other capabilities onto the same computer instead of having separate computers serving each function and communicating back to HMI computer via serial or Ethernet buses? Tremendous cost savings, increased performance, and industrial passive backplane computers are now available with large slot counts catering to as many as 48 axes servo motor control (12 x 4 axes card) simultaneously with IOs and vision in the same box. CompactPCI technology offering hot swap capability, front and rear panel access would also be an ideal alternative.

Second, HMIs/MMIs are being pushed toward Web-centric data centers with offerings of OPC servers, Thin Client servers, and currently XML is being pushed as the key enabler for factory-to-enterprise solutions.

Third, HMI and control would be integrated packages.

Finally, HMI's support also being offered to PDAs and wireless devices.

IEN: Are we entering a new era of E-manufacturing?

Neo: There are indications supporting that. SAP, PeopleSoft and Wonderware with BAAN (Invensys) are offering Enterprise Resource Planning / Manufacturing Execution Systems Software solutions that span all the way down to control level.

Existing technologies are e-ready and the challenge would be implementation, change, and the costs, with labor implications associated with change.

Companies are forced to be competitive to survive and to grow and E-manufacturing would give the competitive edge. E-manufacturing would also enhance the quality process and it is a data-centric system by nature. Companies now have readily on hand real-time data regarding any stage of the manufacturing process, right from order entry to the current status in the production process and down to the component level.

IEN: How will the drive toward lean manufacturing impact this sector?

Neo: E-manufacturing will lead to meaner manufacturing. The impact may be:

• Manufactured products will be less expensive and of higher quality, benefiting end-users


• Better implementation of JIT manufacturing


• High degree of automation will lower labor requirements


• Increased requirements for labor with some degree of IT skills


• Enterprise and Plant Floor integration may be a key factor to enable success. Existing Enterprise MIS managers may not be able to understand plant floor engineering requirements and vice versa, plant managers may not be able to understand Enterprise and IT Computing requirements.


• More intelligent products at the sensors and actuator levels to complement the drive toward lean manufacturing.


• More industrial software to include standard IT software features like: SQL interfaces, ODBC data capabilities, OPC client server capabilities, COM/DCOM/ActiveX interfaces necessary for plant floor software to pump data back to enterprise.