Switches
Five practical tips for industrial switching that protect OEE
By Pooyan Dehghani, product marketing manager, Moxa Europe A
s factories add more vision, robotics, and sensor workloads, the network increasingly decides whether production runs smoothly.
This editorial offers five practical tips to help manufacturing engineers selecting industrial Ethernet switches that cut repair time, protect Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and scale without hidden costs. Each tip includes the reason and a quick check you can run in a pilot cell.
Introduction
Control cabinets have limited space. PLCs often run PROFINET or EtherNet/IP while legacy assets still use Modbus TCP. Vision systems and wireless access points often need Power over Ethernet. When incidents occur, the time to isolate and fix directly impacts availability. The right switch for this environment is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one that makes failures easier to handle, operations easier to see, and growth easier to manage.
OEE measures how efficiently equipment runs across availability, performance, and quality. Networking affects all three. A reliable industrial switch reduces downtime, keeps latency low, and prevents data loss. Good switches raise OEE by keeping production lines connected, stable, and efficient.
Tip 1: Engineer for failure behaviour instead of catalogue features Start with specific failure scenarios such as losing a link, a device, or power. Choose topologies and switches that recover in a predictable way. Use standards such
as Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol for tree networks and Media Redundancy Protocol for ring networks to keep traffic flow during single faults. Ensure status is visible both on the device and in the management interface so that technicians can identify issues quickly.
Pilot validation: Unplug a fibre uplink, then a copper segment. Log the switchover and check the HMI shows an alarm. Target a recovery sequence that a shift lead can explain in one sentence.
Tip 2: Ensure native visibility in PLC and SCADA environments Networks are easier to maintain when the switches appear in the same tools control engineers already use. Support for
PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, and Modbus TCP allows alarms and status to show directly in the HMI or SCADA system. Configuration should be straightforward. A single setting in a web interface or a physical selector
for the right profile reduces commissioning time and learning effort.
Pilot validation: Add the switch as a device to the HMI. Block a port and verify the alarm appears in the same PLC diagnostic view.
20 October 2025
Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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