Software upgrades and revisions – while they’re both a boon and a challenge in every industry, a recent issue of Food Engineering magazine took on the topic from that industry’s point-of-view. The editor asked experts from various companies supplying software solutions to food engineering how their firms keep the learning curve low so users don’t have to relearn everything after a major version upgrade. One of the expert contributors to the article is Rich Carpenter of Emerson, who began by saying, “Emerson emphasizes the ability to migrate existing end-user applications forward, as we know much of the cost of the system is in developing the end application. Emerson also bears in mind concerns with ‘feature bloat’ – which happens as some systems mature and new capabilities are added. For this reason, the Movicon products are very modular, and we can add significant new capabilities as options separately available versus a giant monolith application of increasing complexity.”
Among many interesting topics, the article addresses compatibility in drivers and the increased use of standards such as OPC UA. Carpenter says, “Unlike other products in the industrial automation software space, Emerson maintains our own set of device protocol drivers natively as part of the Movicon products.”
To learn more about how experts handle software versions and upgrades in industries such as food engineering, read the entire article here.