Is your automation asset management out of sync?

摘要

Automation asset management should be part of the business strategy for a manufacturing company to remain competitive, and automation professionals need to help their organization properly plan investments. The accounting and financial systems in many manufacturing organizations treat the useful life of equipment and automation systems as the same. Production equipment typically has a significantly longer useful and productive life than automation and control systems. Defining the same useful and productive life for automation and control systems really doesn't make sense with the rapid changes in technology. An unfortunate example of this is the number of older PCs running in plant operations with old operating systems, such as Windows 3.x versions that have known cybersecurity risks and are not capable of running newer, more secure software. This hardware remains in place, since it has not reached the end of its financial depreciation time. In this case, financial considerations take precedence over secure operations.