Catching up on a lot of news over the past couple of weeks:
The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) has named Mark Tomlinson Executive Director and General Manager. He replaces Nancy Berg, who held the position since February 2000 and resigned last summer after 24 years with SME to pursue a business that helps other non profits focus strategically to grow and to become more relevant and competitive. Tomlinson joined SME in 2003 as Director of Membership with responsibility for Chapter and Technical Activities. In 2005, his responsibilities were expanded after being named Managing Director of Membership.
The ISA-SP88 committee has announced it is beginning work on Part 5 of the widely used ISA 88 series of standards.
The Part 5 standard, to be entitled "Modular Concepts for Automated Control Systems," will define methods for developing a library of automation control components that can be supported by automation vendors for all types of manufacturing.
"The components that we want to specify will provide a base of commonly used automation functions that encourage modularity and define common methods for component interaction in batch, continuous, and discrete manufacturing," said ISA-SP88 chair Dennis Brandl, President of BR&L Consulting.
"Our goal is to provide standard terminology, command and control functionality, a way to describe and identify each modular component, a method for exchanging component definitions, and a method for intercommunications between components," said Dave Chappell of Procter & Gamble, who will serve as the Part 5 Working Group chair.
Kuka Robotics Corp., a manufacturer of industrial robots, has signed a lease at the Scott Technology Transfer & Incubator Center in Omaha, Nebraska with plans to open a new technical facility. The facility will serve as a new showroom testing and validation center for robotic concepts. The center is scheduled for a fall opening.
GE Fanuc Automation has released Proficy Enterprise Connector 1.5, which provides bi-directional enterprise integration between Proficy and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Enterprise Connector enables the mapping of the external business systems requests to/from the Proficy Information Architecture. The information from manufacturing facilities is now available to the business to make more rapid, informed, business decisions.
PPT Vision has announced the new Impact A-10 Intelligent Camera including the bundled Impact software suite. The three software modules- KickStart, Vision Program Manager and Control Panel Manager-allow for quick setup, storage and viewing of captured images through the entire application.
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