Monday, February 4, 2008

Mitsubishi announcement I'm going to a Mitsubishi press conference today at 4 for an announcement, then a private interview and a reception on Wednesday. But, I just saw the announcement on the Business Wire. New product suite for factory automation. e-F@ctory is called Mitsubishi Electric's "vision for manufacturing" unifying its control hardware and networks with enterprise IT through its partnership with IBM and ILS Technologies (see my post of February 2). The primary feature is connectivity of shop floor information with enterprise databases. John Browett, product marketing manager at Mitsubishi Electric Automation, says in the press release, "This is truly groundbreaking technology that provides the tools to immediately improve almost any enterprise's bottom line through increased productivity, reduced lead-times and waste. e-F@ctory was born out of the expertise we developed in-house through facing our own challenges as a global manufacturing enterprise." The four components of the system are iQ Automation, iQ Works, CC-Link networks and enhanced Manufacturing Execution System Interface (eMESIF). iQ Automation is Mitsubishi's version of the programmable automation controller (PAC) leveraging the company's key advantage of speed, and adds CNC and robot control capability. iQ Works is the integrated development environment. CC-Link is the newly open fieldbus network that recently unveiled its gigabit Ethernet capability. eMESIF includes the database connectivity engine and an HMI version. This announcement reveals a significant industry trend--actually several. Mitsubishi major competitor, Rockwell Automation, has announced (over the past year) a relationship with OSIsoft to connect automation control data to the enterprise and also a robot control application for its Logix platform. Rockwell gave up its CNC program something like 10 years ago, giving Mitsubishi an edge there. Siemens Energy & Automation has been working on integration of a different flavor, but is also working on control integration, as well. I have a meeting with the top automation person at Schneider Electric this week, so I'll try to discover what it is up to. GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms has projects underway, I am told. The remaining "major" would be Omron Electronics. I haven't had a technical update from that company for years. I'll have to work on that, now that I have a firm contact there. 10:29:00 AM    comment []

Saving energy, saving money The Consortium for Energy Efficiency, CEE, "brings together efficiency program administrators from across the U.S. and Canada to discover, through conversation, credible, unbiased solutions to issues in the efficiency program industry. As a collective entity, the individual efficiency programs of CEE are able to partner not only with each other, but with other industries, trade associations, and government agencies." It just issued its annual report on the size of industry efficiency programs in 2007. The report states that U.S. programs reached $3.1 billion, an 18 percent increase over 2006. Canada, aggregating numbers for the first time in 2007, reported $0.6 billion, for a North America total of $3.7 billion. The report continues saying the programs saved ratepayers $5.4 billion in 2006 based on energy savings of 59,800 GWh of electricity and 162.6 million therms of gas. It states that the programs abated 36 million metric tonnes of CO2 in 2006, up 7 million tonnes from 2005. 7:50:54 AM    comment []