EPLAN Blog

For the past 17 years, Control Design Magazine has published their Readers' Choice Awards. For the 2017 Awards, they sent out nearly 18,000 ballots to their subscribers who have buying authority or influence for industrial control or automation products.

“Our readers are the people who build the machines that are installed in factories and assembly plants,” said Mike Bacidore, editor in chief of Control Design Magazine.

The survey used an unaided ballot, meaning that they were not given a choice of vendors, but rather wrote in their top two recommendations amongst 65 product categories. Categories included Circuit Protection, embedded Computer Systems, Network Routers and Switches and e-CAD software.

You don’t need a crystal ball to determine what the future holds for manufacturing. This next wave is even a part of some European government initiatives called Industry 4.0, which is based on product creation, from pre-planning to delivery, involving communication among the parts to be created and the assembly line machines.

Tremendous changes are taking place as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which is poised to shake up the way production is done. Here are 5 things you don’t want your competition to know about what this means for 21^st Century machine production.

No matter what the industrial application, creating wire harness assemblies is a painstaking element of machine design. Though crucial, it has traditionally been a manual process, oftentimes saved for the end of the design process with individual teams working on their end and moving it along to the next “island.” The development can be cumbersome, with conversions being passed back and forth between groups and manual data reentry required as changes are made.

Industry recognition is a big deal, so you’ll forgive us if we brag a bit about a recent accolade we received.