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Feature Coverage
Longer-form reporting on plant operations, manufacturing technology, workforce strategy, and capital decisions.
Tulip, Honeywell and Siemens with NVIDIA announced factory AI agent platforms within two weeks. They target different problems, sit at different stages of release, and none of them has published pricing. Here is how they compare on deployment, integration, human control and the numbers behind the claims.
Predictive maintenance is not a plant-wide upgrade over preventive. It is a choice you make one asset at a time, based on how the asset fails, how critical it is and how long spare parts take to arrive. This guide uses DOE, NIST and RCM research to show where calendar PMs work, where condition monitoring pays and where running to failure is the sensible choice.
Vendor surveys put an hour of downtime at $125,000 or even $2.3 million. Your line has its own number. Here is how to build it from lost contribution margin and incremental recovery costs, without double counting.
Three common OEE shortcuts can turn a 55% line into an 82% number: a shrunken denominator, a padded cycle time and an unweighted plant average. Here is the recalculation on one sheet, with a worked example.
The new Industrial AI Arena puts 32 exhibitors plus Sandia National Laboratories on one floor at McCormick Place. Five questions — data, ownership, edge, references, and a benchmarked ROI claim — will tell you which demos survive contact with a real plant, and which ones are a retrofit project wearing a software price tag.
Boston Scientific's order intake kept running while its ability to ship did not. That gap — EDI up, fulfillment down — is the outage most discrete manufacturers have never rehearsed, and the fix is mostly paper, printers and pre-approved procedure.
GE Vernova now has 100 GW of heavy-duty gas turbines under contract against roughly 10 GW per year of production capacity. Non-refundable slot reservation deposits are letting hyperscalers compete directly with regulated utilities for 2029-2030 frames — and they are winning on price.
Hitachi's CES 2026 reveals and HMAX Energy launch deliberately plant its industrial-AI flag on substations, rail, and heavy process — not the discrete-plant and fluid-line AI being sold by Stellantis/Accenture/NVIDIA and Edison-winning Laminar. The framing has real engineering consequences.
Stellantis and Accenture's plan to scale NVIDIA-powered digital twins isn't the story. The story is that a volume automaker is publicly naming a systems integrator and a GPU vendor as the architects of its plant-floor orchestration layer — and the brief doesn't say who owns it.