Mitsubishi Electric Automation Showcased Initiatives at 2009 ARC Manufacturing Forum

Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc. utilized the 2009 ARC Manufacturing Forum in Orlando, Florida to showcase their new initiatives, including three new ARC White Papers and a new top-of-the-line Multimedia Human Machine Interface.

At a press conference on the first day of the forum, Mitsubishi Electric Automation spokesperson Sloan Zupan listed the major concerns of manufacturing and processing organizations, which include improvements in quality and workforce efficiency, raising operation rates and workforce safety, and reducing the carbon footprint of operations, especially in the area of energy. He then detailed how a wide range of Mitsubishi Electric initiatives, including the e-F@ctory architecture, addresses these concerns.

“Becoming a sustainable manufacturing and processing organization relies on triple bottom line thinking,” Zupan said. “The triple bottom line entails sustainable improvements to the economics of the enterprise, a sustained reduction in environmental impacts, and meaningful contributions to society. We not only use this framework within our own operations, but we also help our customers achieve sustainable milestones, particularly in their economic bottom lines through implementing and operating lowest total-cost-of-ownership automation systems, and in their environmental bottom lines through energy savings.”

During the news conference, Mitsubishi Electric Automation updated journalists on its work of integrating the Cognex In-Sight vision system into its iQ platform. Mitsubishi claimed the iQ platform, which incorporates all major control and communication systems onto a single backplane, improves operations and lowers total costs. The company welcomed Jerry Yen as the first director of its new solutions center. Mr. Yen, a former General Motors technical fellow and principal engineer, was one of the founders of the Open Modular Controls Architecture (OMAC) Users group. The solutions center will be responsible for integrating Mitsubishi Electric and partner products, and testing new product capabilities with existing installed assets.

The company launched its new top-of-the-line Human Machine Interface (HMI) platform — the GT16 series that features advanced multimedia capabilities. Lastly, the company described three new white papers it commissioned the ARC Advisory Group to research and write on the topics of trends and issues in machine vision, HMI, and quality.