Tuesday, January 23, 2007

German Trip I appreciate the comments back from my last podcast. I took a little time in the hotel room last night to experiment with recording. It appears that I have a problem (loose connection most likely) in one of my USB ports. I'm still playing with the system. The American editors met at the hotel in Ulm last night and went to dinner together. One brief discussion was the ethics of going to single-vendor meetings. I think I reflect the group consensus that these are the only way we can cover all the companies any more. At least in automation, there really are no trade shows where we can see all the companies and get updates. The danger for us is that for several days one company gets the bulk of the publicity--not bad for the company, but we editors need to be able to step back and take a longer view even while we're immersed in thinking about just the one company. 4:43:52 AM    comment []

Bosch Rexroth summit I am in Ulm in south-central Germany in the German mountains at the 2nd Bosch-Rexroth technology summit for international press. Yesterday was a travel day, so no posts. There are 80 editors here from 18 countries. After immersion in process control, the theme this week is factory automation, especially motion systems. Manfred Grundke, chairman of the executive board of Bosch-Rexroth started the presentations with an overview of the business. In 2005, B-R had sales of about 4.6 millions Euros, up about 8 percent from the previous year. Sales in the US were up 23 percent, though, leading the company's growth, although sales in Asia were also up 18 percent. The company is focusing on food & packaging, medical, renewable energy and semiconductor industries for growth. To this end, it has established a technical center in San Francisco. Reiner Leipold-Buettner, member of the executive committee responsible for engineering and manufacturing, noted that B-R invested 193 million Euros in R&D in 2005, 4.2 percent of sales. For the next couple of days, we'll be taking a deep dive into the many technologies and product groups that B-R supplies. I'm already getting ideas for future articles that you'll see in future issues of Automation World. They do a lot of interesting motion systems built from standard components. These should be interesting for OEMs. 4:35:35 AM    comment []