MORE THAN MY BLOGS WORTH?: Carl Henning recently received high praise indeed from Automation World's Gary Mintchell. FUD has been a recurring theme of Carl's PROFIblog and in a recent revival Gary responded with an item wondering why FUD is deemed so necessary by certain vendors. PROFIblog continues to cover topics of all types as Carl flexes his typing muscles in ever more interesting ways. His recent visit to Beiling for a PI meeting somehow morphed out of a PROFINET one day training event in Detroit, where more people than had registered turned up (113 actually) to confound Carl's unsophisticated algorithm for estimating how many lunches to order. Elsewhere he rants about never, ever, using a fieldbus. Isn't the truth always stranger than fiction?

Read how PROFIBUS and PROFINET are helping end users be successful around the world:

BRAZILIAN SUGAR AND ALCOHOL UPGRADES: A new White Paper has been published here

PROFINET HELPS TOBACCO PLANT :
Founded in 1939, the Xuzhou Tobacco Factory, located in the eastern province of Jiangsu, is one of the largest cigarette factories in China with fixed assets of 1.7 billion RMB (around $125M) and an annual production yield of 0.5 million cartons of cigarettes. The company was interested in implementing an innovative automation solution that would offer the flexibility to produce a larger number of product variants. In addition, customer system requirements called for easy traceability of production processes and an overall reduction of production costs. Siemens provided a PROFINET-based solution which included 10 SIMATIC S7-400 CPUs with SIMATIC NET CP 443-1 Advanced Ethernet communication processors and over 60 SIMATIC ET 200S stations with integrated PROFINET interfaces. WinCC HMI stations with SIMATIC Panel PCs and CP 1616 were also installed. SCALANCE X-400 industrial switches form the backbone of the network. Using PROFINET CBA (Component Based Automation) whereby modules of automation not only provided fast engineering but also the necessary production flexibility. By shortening production duration and requirements, the new solution resulted in substantial cost reductions. The increased system flexibility offered by the modularity of the PROFINET CBA solution made faster production adaptation to market requirements possible. Moreover, the system now enables real-time recording of all aspects of the production processes.

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