24 Years for PI North America
Last month PI North America hosted their General Assembly Meeting (GAM) from September 11th to 13th in Scottsdale, Arizona. This GAM marked the 24th birthday for PI North America. The meeting updated attendees on the organization’s initiatives, future plans, and technology trends. In the previous GAM, PI North America switched their meeting schedule to a biennial format. The longer wait period between meetings brought a lot of interesting discussions for this meeting. Some of the discussions included topics such as TSN, OPC UA, APL, Industry 4.0, Security, and IO-Link.
PI North America updated their members on the state of the organization. They showed a strong position to continue growing and reaching more of the North American market in the upcoming years. PI North America’s mission of assisting and educating the market prevails. This year they announced a revamped new website with additional resources, increased attendance in PROFINET training classes, a strong membership, and a wide variety of educational materials.
Industry Foursight
The main theme of the meeting was Industry Foursight: a play-on-words of Foresight and Industry 4.0. PI North America will use this concept as their message and initiatives to come…
“Industry 4.0 has a lot of requirements and it’s an exciting time to be involved in industrial automation. New solutions are taking shape and stand to make automation networks easier to manage, faster to run, and most importantly, provide value like never before. (…) There’s no silver bullet, but PROFINET plays a key role.”
After two
whole days of insightful discussions, talks, and networking events, the GAM ended with end-user presentations of application stories. A series of PROFINET users presented their experience implementing smart industrial networks, migrating from other Ethernet technologies, integrating MES/ERP systems, and creating new business models with IIoT approaches. The application stories gave an insider perspective of the industry trends influencing business models and industrial networks.
-Nelly Ayllon