Here you’ll find writings on topics critical to today’s and tomorrow’s connected B2B enterprise. (Never mind the unavoidable overlap with writings elsewhere in this e-portfolio, including IoT and 3D printing.)

• Blockchain Brings Efficient Packaging Traceability to Food Supply Chains: Who knew agribusiness firm Cargill would perennially rank in Forbes’ Blockchain 50 alongside IT leaders? Exec Borre Moolenaar shares personal insights on getting started. Meantime, the company continues expanding the global Covantis blockchain consortium it co-founded to automate the manual processing of 11,000 global agribusiness commodity shipments. (Packaging Digest; Design News)
• Cobots: Are You Ready to Do It Yourself? A guide for hands-on operational leaders considering the use of cobots, or collaborative robots, to work side-by-side with human laborers in light of recent trends including ease-of-use/engineering advances. (Design News; Packaging Digest)

• Dare to Dream — of a Unified Industrial Network Standard is a cover story that explains how and when new field-level communications protocols (OPC UA FLC) combined with real-time Ethernet TSN extensions will finally put an end to technical and competitive issues between “warring suppliers,” as a prominent ExxonMobil chief engineer says in this article. (Smart Industry; digital edition or web version.)

• Finding the silver lining in cloud analytics reveals new analytics opportunities from production to supply chain and instills best-practice solution-think, thanks to luminaries at ARC, ABI, Dow, Cisco, Emerson, Northwest Analytics, SAS, Seeq and Siemens. (SmartIndustry; link)

• Will AI liberate the IoT’s potential? reveals how 99 percent of corporate leaders who combine AI with IoT to form an AIoT — Artificial Intelligence of Things — achieve greater-than-expected benefits, per research from SAS, Deloitte, Intel and IDC. (SmartIndustry; link)
• Service is the new sizzle tracks the threat of commoditization not just for manufactured goods but manufacturing itself, and the industry’s response: using AI- and IoT-powered predictive service value-adds to guarantee customer uptime and build revenues. (SmartIndustry; link)
• Edge, cloud or something in between? tracks the rise in IoT-connected edge computing networks from the perspective of pros at firms including SAP, Cisco, Oracle, and Intel, whose Twitter and LinkedIn promotions were welcome. (Smart Industry; link)
• IIoT developers start delivering better process data tracks the rise and success of cloud-based operational and business analytics applications in the process industries. (Control/Controlglobal.com; link)

• PlantMan Go — The future of asset lifecycle modeling heralds the convergence of PLM AR/VR, IoT and more tech for a unified, lifecycle model for process plants. (Control / Controlglobal.com; link)
• Big Data is watching your factory say SAP, Festo, Siemens, and GE, as industrial internet of things and Industry 4.0 take root. (DirectIndustry)
• How New-Generation 3D Visualization Technology Will Transform The Workforce of Tomorrow tells (and shows via videos) the convergence of 3D visualization, AR/VR and an integrated IT infrastructure for a new generation of industrial workers. (Siemens; multiple vertical channels.)
• Automakers rev-up efficiency with 3D and VR, as explained in this piece on the state of the collaborative IT art via Dassault Systemes’ 3DExperience platform that pervades the automaking enterprise. (DirectIndustry.com)

• User-friendly and adaptable: Robotics on the packaging line: This story for the European and North American markets brings news of on robotics to CPG production from pick/place to end-of-line operations. (DirectIndustry.com)
• Essentials of Cyber Security: My job was to contextualize cyber threats and resources for those who engineer and work with industrial control systems. Author: Honeywell. (Putman/Honeywell)
• Find more on factory/plant automation at my Automation World author page.

And…from the archives:

•  Take 2000 was a 32-page pre-Y2K book from my days as Editorial Director of Software Strategies, a manufacturing enterprise integration magazine. The link shows my kickoff Editor’s column and feature.
• FPI applications of CIM alliances: What did the IT landscape look like in the early days of “Computer Integrated Manufacturing?” This article’s a throwback for the ages, using food processing industry (FPI) examples.