“The software is expensive and complex,” Carrigan said,


and therefore not replaced easily or often. “When it was put in, security wasn’t an issue and there are lots of holes. One of our strengths is that we’ve built adaptors to work with these old control systems.” Carrigan said that hackers will get into a system—most often entering via a phishing scam—and look around for months or even years before attacking, making changes to the control system that normally go undetected. PAS’ services include detecting if a change has been made.


“I can tell you everything that’s changed on a control system over time,” he said. “The next step is rolling back the system to its previous confi guration.” As sometimes happens, however, the existing technology itself dies off in the face of new, digitized processes. “Certain types of machines, like vertical machining centers, are not made for automation because they need an operator standing in front of them,” said Robert Humphreys, international sales manager for factory automation company Fastems (West Chester, OH).


The sole advantage to a vertical machining center is its low initial cost, said Humphreys, but the owners’ labor costs will increase year after year. What’s the answer? “Maybe not doing away with vertical machining centers,” Humphreys said in predicting the future of automation. “But some sort of move to make vertical machin- ing centers more productive.”


A La Carte Menu of Apps RedViking (Plymouth, MI) recently introduced Argonaut, a manufactur- ing execution system that not only rejects the one-size-fi ts-all approach to MES by serving up apps that can be ordered a la carte, it also scraps the


March 2017 | AdvancedManufacturing.org 45


need for a server, line-side PCs and a top-heavy information technology department. Like Greek mythology’s Argonauts, a band of heroes who helped Jason fi nd the Golden Fleece, each of


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