Embicon Tech Hub

The Internet of Things is transforming every corner of life: the home, the office, city streets and beyond. IoT products give us greater control over door locks, lights and appliances; offer insights into resource consumption habits; streamline business processes; and better connect us to the people, systems and environments that shape our daily lives.

Whether you’re a homeowner looking for the best products to start building your connected life, or a business leader looking to take your company to the next level — this is the place to begin. We’ve collected the best and most popular options the IoT has to offer, from smart home devices to enterprise platforms to the software and tools you need to build your own smart, connected products.

Following the introduction of mechanical production systems, work-sharing mass production and the automation of production processes, a fourth industrial revolution is now on the horizon. And the term introduced for this – “Industrie 4.0” – already points toward intelligent, networked systems: previously separated production environments are combined to produce universal production worlds, which are partly of a physical nature, and partly attain a new functionality in the cyber space of web connectivity. The focal point in this development is the convergence of information and automation technology, for which Embicon laid the foundation already in 1986 with PC-based Control, and it still offers the optimum control architecture for future Industrie 4.0 concepts. 

In order to realise Industrie 4.0 following a genuinely holistic approach, three aspects have to be implemented: horizontal integration across company boundaries, vertical integration through networked production systems, and integrated engineering throughout the product lifecycle. PC control offers the right solution for all of that, especially since it can be adapted very flexibly to varying application requirements: intelligence can be arranged in a hierarchically modular fashion under the central controller, but also decentralised, i.e. with equal rights if necessary. In addition, there are hardly any technical systems today that cannot be operated by PC or at least be connected to a PC via software. Considering the great variety of manufacturing systems and technologies that are used in industrial enterprises, the key role of PC technology as an open platform and defacto industry standard for automation is obvious.

The openness and universality of PC Control can also be seen – entirely in the sense of Industrie 4.0 – in current research work for the seamless integration of information areas that until now have been separated. Embicon is one of the core companies of the technology network “it’s OWL” (short for intelligent technical systems OstWestfalenLippe) which was distinguished in 2012 by the BMBF as a “Leading-Edge Cluster” and represents the first large-scale project supported in the context of Industrie 4.0. Here, Embicon as consortium leader of the innovation project “ScAut” – one of the three key projects of the leading-edge cluster – is driving the integration of engineering findings into standard automation under the keyword “Scientific Automation”.

Modbus is a serial communications protocol originally published by Modicon (now Schneider Electric) in 1979 for use with its programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Modbus has become a de facto standard communication protocol and is now a commonly available means of connecting industrial electronic devices.^[1] Modbus is popular in industrial environments because it is openly published and royalty-free. It was developed for industrial applications, is relatively easy to deploy and maintain compared to other standards, and places few restrictions other than size on the format of the data to be transmitted.

Modbus enables communication among many devices connected to the same network, for example, a system that measures temperature and humidity and communicates the results to a computer. Modbus is often used to connect a supervisory computer with a remote terminal unit (RTU) in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Many of the data types are named from industry usage of Ladder logic and its use in driving relays: a single-bit physical output is called a coil, and a single-bit physical input is called a discrete input or a contact.

The development and update of Modbus protocols has been managed by the Modbus Organization^[2] since April 2004, when Schneider Electric transferred rights to that organization.^[3] The Modbus Organization is an association of users and suppliers of Modbus-compliant devices that advocates for the continued use of the technology

• Compliance Management: Streamline management of controlled information, accelerate the traceability of documents and improve audit reporting. 
• Workflow Assessment Services: Gain a data-driven view of document-based business processes. Dynamic visualisations highlight areas for workflow enhancement or automation, giving you a new view into business process trends, paper and storage costs and step-by-step process details. 
• Automated Invoice Processing: Reduce the time, cost, risk and complexity of capturing, routing and approving invoices, wherever they originate, and without significantly changing the way people work. 
• Document Lifecycle Management: Automate time-based events such as publication, distribution and expiration of compliance-related documentation. Efficiently manage documentation from the moment it’s created or updated until the time it’s no longer needed or destroyed. 
• Accounts Payable: Electronically manage the documents and data that drive AP processes for faster, more accurate invoice processing.
• Accounts Receivable: Digitise manual processes—like paper checks and remittance documents—to reduce DSO and improve cash flow visibility. 
• HR Onboarding: Track the entire employee onboarding process and monitor tasks across departments through a centralised location that enables automation and increases visibility.  
• Xerox Document Analytics Service: Understand how, where and why documents are used, and then work smarter through digitisation, workflow optimisation and distributed access.
• Personal and Office Productivity: Help knowledge workers automate and simplify their personal and office work experiences with tools such as mobile apps, DocuShare content management and ConnectKey technology. 

A remote, online, or managed backup service, sometimes marketed as cloud backup or backup-as-a-service, is a service that provides users with a system for the backup, storage, and recovery of computer files. Online backup providers are companies that provide this type of service to end users (or clients). Such backup services are considered a form of cloud computing.

Online backup systems are typically built for a client software program that runs on a given schedule. Some systems run once a day, usually at night while computers aren't in use. Other newer cloud backup services run continuously to capture changes to user systems nearly in real-time. The online backup system typically collects, compresses, encrypts, and transfers the data to the remote backup service provider's servers or off-site hardware.

There are many products on the market – all offering different feature sets, service levels, and types of encryption. Providers of this type of service frequently target specific market segments. High-end LAN-based backup systems may offer services such as Active Directory, client remote control, or open file backups. Consumer online backup companies frequently have beta software offerings and/or free-trial backup services with fewer live support options.