Plant IT

Book excerpt: Information Technology (IT) is an important element of plant floor operations and Dennis Brandl’s monthly column on Manufacturing IT in Control Engineering magazine covers IT aspects that are critical to modern manufacturing. This book expands on the magazine’s explanations of the concepts and tools needed to achieve higher manufacturing productivity and efficiencies. Written for manufacturing professionals, the book overviews the wide range of IT elements underlying the manufacturing IT environment. It provides you with the information to be conversant in IT elements and to effectively manage and participate in manufacturing IT projects. Each chapter of the book discusses an IT issue that is important to a manufacturing company, including practical programming, real-world design considerations, databases and master data management, knowledge management, tools and programming languages, cyber security, managing resource information and regulations. And because software engineering is a foundation for all IT elements, this book also provides important points about software engineering and software project management for non-software engineers who must manage or participate in IT projects. Familiarity with all these topics will help you facilitate cooperation between manufacturing and IT professionals to achieve more effective implementations of plant floor operations IT— resulting in increased production productivity and product quality.