In the last several years, many industrial-based businesses – such as food and beverage, oil and gas, power utilities, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and others – have focused on improving their financial standing by investing in sensor-laden automated systems that maximize productivity and streamline production.

From subsea drilling 6,000 feet below the surface to pipelines that cross many landscapes to intense refining processes, the range of conditions for oil and gas installations is very broad. As a design engineer, you may be involved with many types of projects with very different requirements. How then do you approach selecting the right cable for an oil and gas application?

In Part 1 of this series I described 4 big trends affecting manufacturing and pointed out the challenges and opportunities with each of them, at a high level. The 4 big trends are the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Cloud Computing and Industry 4.0.

Every decade has its big manufacturing trends and hyped-up IT issue(s). Remember Y2K? Nowadays there are several topics that have been the subject of numerous articles in manufacturing trade publications. 

Industrial Ethernet networks are becoming more sophisticated as organizations strive for high reliability and performance plus seamless data access and reporting. Flat networks are evolving into managed infrastructure and there are many new technologies, such as redundancy using PRP (Parallel Redundancy Protocol) to consider.