Recent Factory Automation News for July 17, 2023
, by Jim Ryan, 1 min reading time
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A report on Automate 2023 (with photos!), which was held in Detroit in late May.
In case you missed it, the Institute of Supply Management reported this month that June was the eighth consecutive month of contraction in manufacturing. More here, where we see this from economist Kieran Clancy: "Manufacturing remains in a sorry state -- automakers excepted...." (emphasis added).
New robotic welding technology? From Ficep UK. It performs "the robotic welding of all secondary components on the main member. It automatically senses all the relative surfaces...." And "its innovative software automatically downloads the CAD data, or auto-generates welds as per customer specifications." Perhaps Ficep will show this tech at FABTECH 2023.
News you can use: U.S. factories are subject to ransomeware attacks and managers need to start thinking like a ransomeware attacker. It's important to understand that large, well-funded, state sponsered teams of attackers (APTs: advanced persistent threats) are attempting to harm manufacturing interests of their employers' enemies, using other attacks besides ransomeware. Here's a recent report on APT attacks against manufacturers in 2022. (An APT is typically a couple of dozen hackers in a government office who show up every day and put in their forty hours trying to spy on or destroy their enemies' infrastructure. It's not a jerk in a hoodie hacking in his free time. It is a force to be reckoned with.)