Article Category
Procurement notes and technical articles grouped under News for industrial automation buyers.
Jul 21, 2026
A panel temperature controller can be small enough to be overlooked in a plant spare review, yet its failure can stop a heater, upset a batch, or force an operator to run without a trusted indication. The Yokogawa UT350-01 must be identified by input, output, alarm, power, wiring, and loop role rather than by front-panel…
Jul 20, 2026
A DCS power-supply failure can look like a controller, I/O, or network failure because several racks lose visibility together. For a Yokogawa CENTUM installation, the spare plan must account for rack position, load, redundancy, alarm contacts, Vnet dependencies, and restart sequence. A power module on the shelf is useful only when the recovery path is…
Jul 17, 2026
GE Multilin UR systems are often maintained as a family even though the actual failure may involve a CPU, digital I/O, CT/VT module, power supply, or communication card. The wrong spare can fit the relay cabinet and still fail to restore the protection function because the settings, firmware, or external wiring do not match. DriveKNMS…
Jul 16, 2026
A protection relay replacement is not an ordinary control-module swap. The relay may sit between a measured fault and a trip decision, so the procurement record has to preserve the installed function, wiring, settings ownership, test method, and approval path. A close-looking front panel is not enough evidence for a safe replacement. DriveKNMS readers often…
Jul 15, 2026
Remote telemetry failures are often treated as communication problems until a water station, tank farm, pump house, pipeline valve site, or substation disappears from the control room. At that point the question becomes practical: does the maintenance team have the gateway, modem, antenna, power supply, cables, and configuration evidence needed to restore visibility? DriveKNMS readers…
Jul 14, 2026
A historian server can fail quietly for months before anyone treats it as a spare-parts problem. Operators still see live values. Production continues. Then an audit, incident review, power event, or server fault exposes the truth: trend history, alarm context, batch evidence, and maintenance diagnostics were depending on one under-documented machine. DriveKNMS readers should treat…
Jul 7, 2026
Advisory reviews often focus on patching, isolation, or device replacement. For monitoring teams, the final question is more practical: after the spare is installed, do operators actually have alarms, visibility, trends, and confidence? HMI alarm acceptance should be part of the recovery plan, not an afterthought. DriveKNMS readers know that monitoring failures are rarely judged…
Jul 5, 2026
The latest CISA ICS advisory list is a useful reminder that monitoring recovery depends on more than application updates. A plant may own spare hardware, yet still lose alarm visibility, trends, reports, or remote diagnostics if the backup cannot be restored. Backup validation is the quiet spare check that prevents blind recovery. DriveKNMS readers often…
Jul 3, 2026
The July 2, 2026 CISA advisory for ST Engineering iDirect iQ-Series Terminals is a monitoring-system recovery story. A remote site may have a healthy controller and a clean local HMI, yet the control room can still lose visibility if the satellite terminal, router, power supply, or antenna path fails. For reliability teams, that is not…
Jul 1, 2026
CISA advisory ICSA-26-181-02 for Frangoteam FUXA SCADA/HMI, released on June 30, 2026, should make plants look closely at lightweight monitoring systems. These systems are often installed for utility skids, packaging cells, pilot lines, remote assets, energy dashboards, or small OEM packages. They may not carry the same governance as a major DCS, but they can…
