The demand for businesses to adopt an energy policy that increases efficiency has grown exponentially over the last few decades. New legislation, rising fuel prices and changing industry standards all require companies to monitor and control their energy consumption with higher accuracy. This can not only help to achieve more sustainable operations, but also allows…
It is hard to imagine a current automation system working without the capacity to use some sort of database technology. The process data needed for effective control and analysis in order to improve productivity is becoming extensive. The result is that SCADA systems are needed not simply to perform their traditional supervisory control and monitoring…
It is hard to imagine a current automation system working without the capacity to use some sort of database technology. The process data needed for effective control and analysis in order to improve productivity is becoming extensive. The result is that SCADA systems are needed not simply to perform their traditional supervisory control and monitoring…
Progea, one of the world’s leading innovators in software for industrial supervisory control and visualisation, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its founding. The company has used the occasion to mark the release of NExT, a completely new SCADA product designed from a clean sheet to address the needs of SCADA applications of the next…
Attractive pre-set graphics that are easy to drag and drop during the design process, and which are easy to link to standard inputs, all help to make great looking SCADA screens. But they also need to be easily adaptable to custom requirements to keep users engaged. Paul Hurst of Products4Automation examines key trends in SCADA…
Being able to control and monitor critical plant from a smartphone or tablet computer is proving to highly beneficial to plant production, management and maintenance personnel alike. SCADA systems are now able to support this current advance in industrial control, as Paul Hurst of Products4Automation (P4A) explores. Smartphones, tablet computers and other similar mobile devices…
Paul Hurst, MD independent UK SCADA and HMI vendor Products4Automation (P4A). Industrial SCADA is undergoing a step change right now, with the move from proprietary code to next generation technologies such as compatibility with SQL Databases and Cloud Computing .NET, OPC UA and HTML5. This is part of moving towards a more connected world and…
Industry 4.0 is a concept that has shaped automation dramatically since its conception at the 2011 Hannover Fair. Attaining a ‘smart factory’ requires total interoperability and the utmost transparency of information between devices – which means SCADA software is required to be more versatile than ever before. These requirements have been carefully considered by Progea,…
A new anaerobic digestion plant built by Lake District Biogas at First Milk’s Aspatria creamery site in Cumbria has been installed to generate bio-methane. It is producing over £3m per year in cost savings, while supplying up to 25% of the creamery’s energy requirements. Providing full control and visualisation of the system is a Movicon…
Effective site-wide energy management is a key function of the new control system which is being used to synchronise heat systems that include new biomass boilers. A grain drying and storage facility that supplies some of Scotland’s leading distilleries has installed a new Movicon SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system from Products4Automation (P4A) to…