Digitalization & New Technologies

Factories, mills, and plants are now seeking to improve factory efficiency, productivity, and sustainability to maintain a competitive edge in years to come. Not everyone will succeed, but it is easy to spot the telling signs of the companies standing among the winners in ten years, if you know where to look.

Smart factories, mills, and plants optimize efficiency and productivity in numerous ways, combining physical production processes with digital technology, smart computing, and big data. What kind of actions are we talking about in practice? To illustrate the path forward, we gathered five real-life inspirational smart factory examples of the steps industrial companies have taken toward intelligent factory automation creating a smarter, more efficient, and sustainable future.

Competence development is the key to successful change management and boosting business processes.

In previous articles we introduced the concept of virtual actors and their potential use in IoT, data stream processing, gaming and other fields. We also compared 4 most popular actor frameworks for the .NET ecosystem: Orleans, Proto.actor, Akka.Net and Dapr. Let’s see how they perform in an artificial messaging benchmark.

It’s a well-known fact that the cyber security threats faced by companies and people, in general, are only growing with the ever-changing business and political landscape. This coupled with the rising expectations for user experience from consumers as well as business customers, ushers in a new era of application management.

Factories, plants, and mills are now looking into smarter operations through better processes and technology, as well as human capabilities. The need for more sustainable businesses increases the pressure to get started ahead of the competition. But what are the first important steps that pave the way towards smarter future?

When we think about smart factories, the first thing that comes to mind often relates to technology, like robotics, automation, and highly modern production lines. However, before a factory, plant, or mill can benefit from the latest gadgets and equipment, they need to pay attention to the basics – the smart in smart factories stems from somewhere else entirely. We sat down with Etteplan’s Smart Factory experts Juha Nieminen and Kari Jussila about what exactly makes factories smart.

Reshoring pioneers driven by a business reality How Omron in the Netherlands was one of the first companies to move ‘far-away’ production closer to home. What’s their secret?

The previous article in the series introduced the concept of virtual actor model. Now let’s take a look at what tools we have at our disposal in the .NET ecosystem. In the next few sections we’ll describe the popular framework choices: Orleans, Proto.Actor, Akka.Net, and Dapr. We’ll focus on their unique features and approach.