Platform Comparison
How to Choose a PLC for Food Processing Environments
Washdown ratings, sanitary design, and why the cheapest PLC on the spec sheet is rarely the cheapest one to own.
Written by the engineers who do the commissioning, not by marketing. Ten articles covering platform selection, network security, documentation practice, and the maintenance patterns we see most often in the field.
Washdown ratings, sanitary design, and why the cheapest PLC on the spec sheet is rarely the cheapest one to own.
Patterns we see repeatedly across plant audits — flat networks, undocumented changes, and credentials that have outlived three engineers.
The zone-and-conduit model explained for engineers who need to implement it on a live plant floor, not just read about it.
Availability, performance, and quality look simple on a dashboard. The ways plants quietly game each component are not.
A quick reference for engineers navigating overlapping and sometimes conflicting standards bodies across different markets.
What actually needs to be in a Factory and Site Acceptance Test package, and the gaps that show up most often during regulatory review.
Tag naming, retention policy, and compression settings decided during commissioning that determine whether your historian is still queryable later.
The line between a programmable logic controller and a programmable automation controller has blurred. Here's where it still has real consequences.
Vibration sensors and machine learning dashboards get the headlines. The maintenance programs that actually save money usually start somewhere simpler.
Most plants can't afford to replace a 20-year-old control system all at once. Here's how to bring it into a modern SCADA environment in place.