Manufacturing & Industrial Technology

Norwalk, Conn. – October 27, 2026 -- Xerox introduced three color printer and multifunction printer lines, the Xerox C240/C245, C255a and C300/C303a/C305ae. They are the first hardware launched under the unified Xerox brand since the company's integration with Lexmark.

Xerox now describes itself as a single technology company spanning print, IT infrastructure and intelligent digital services. The new brand identity, including a refreshed logo, accompanies the launch. The three lines are the first products to bring the combined Xerox-Lexmark portfolio to market.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Industrial teams can locate missing historian records by tracing one test message across five boundaries: broker receipt, subscriber receipt, parsing, database write and query. The approach comes from troubleshooting guidance on TDengine's MQTT ingestion, which warns that a live broker feed or a connected publisher proves only part of the chain.

One tagged test message anchors the diagnosis

Engineers should publish a single message for one equipment tag through the approved production path, such as plant/line2/pump07/pressure. They should log the exact topic, payload bytes, broker timestamp, publisher identity, destination table and intended source timestamp. Each test needs a fresh timestamp, because identical timestamps can make a successful write indistinguishable from an earlier one.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Even QoS 2's exactly-once delivery covers only one MQTT sender-receiver flow, not the subscriber's database transaction, so an MQTT broker cannot serve as an industrial historian. A broker moves messages between publishers and subscribers. A historian keeps time-indexed records that engineers can query, trend and aggregate later.

Broker retention mechanisms fall short of historical storage

A retained message is only the current message for a topic, and a new one normally replaces the prior state. A persistent session preserves subscriptions and eligible queued messages for an offline client. Session expiry, broker capacity, message expiry and administrative policy can all limit what remains.

Broker persistence protects broker state across restarts. It does not define table schemas, engineering timestamps, multi-year retention, SQL queries, aggregates or audit-ready change history.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- An MQTT message is only a topic plus a payload, so a usable historian record needs four additions: stable equipment identity, typed measurements, a trustworthy timestamp and a schema that survives device and site growth. Engineers should settle these before configuring ingestion into TDengine TSDB Enterprise. Skipping that step can produce technically successful writes that create tables that are hard to query, compare or maintain.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- TDengine is framing Industrial AI as decision support built on three layers (data, context and analysis) rather than as autonomous plant control, with accountability remaining with engineers and operators.

Industrial AI applies standard methods to physical operations

The approach uses machine learning, computer vision and generative AI on data from equipment, sensors, control systems, operational records and engineering documents. What makes an application industrial is the work it supports: pumps, compressors, production lines, energy systems and material flows. Enterprise AI, by contrast, mostly handles digital workflows such as drafting documents or summarizing meetings.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- A historian export of tags and timestamps is rarely a training-ready dataset for Industrial AI, according to TDengine guidance that tells engineers to establish what each measurement means, when it happened, which asset produced it and whether it is reliable before data reaches an external model-training workflow.

Engineers define the pump decision before selecting data

For a centrifugal pump, the guiding question is whether a reliability engineer should review the pump given its recent operating signals. That differs from asking a model to declare the cause of a failure. Records created after a maintenance decision must not become inputs, because they would not exist when the model makes its prediction.

Fulda – October 27, 2026 -- WEMAG, the family-run tool and machinery distributor from Fulda, is marking its 90th anniversary in 2026 with more than 200 employees, six locations in Germany and a range of roughly five million articles, and is now investing in robotic order picking and automated logistics.

Merchant Adolf Ruland founded WEMAG Werkzeug- und Maschinengesellschaft on May 5, 1936. WEMAG GmbH & Co. KG is now run by the fourth generation. Helmut Schaus, the founder's son-in-law, took over management in 1948, followed by his son Joachim Schaus in 1972. Christopher Schaus joined in 2004, entered management in 2010 and received the symbolic company key from his father in 2018.

LUND, Sweden – October 27, 2026 -- Alfa Laval's third-quarter order intake rose 36 percent to SEK 23.2 billion (17.1), with organic growth of 33 percent, while the company guided to somewhat lower demand in the fourth quarter.

Sales grow 8 percent as margin narrows to 18.1 percent

Net sales increased 8 percent to SEK 18,596 million (17,244), up 6 percent organically. Adjusted EBITA rose 6 percent to SEK 3,364 million (3,180). The adjusted EBITA margin slipped to 18.1 percent from 18.4 percent a year earlier.

Result after financial items reached SEK 3,050 million (2,967). Net income fell to SEK 2,262 million (2,303), and earnings per share declined to SEK 5.40 (5.53).

Operating cash flow climbs to SEK 3.4 billion

Cash flow from operating activities reached SEK 3,373 million, up from SEK 2,206 million in the prior-year quarter.

Germany – October 27, 2026 -- IGZ Ingenieurgesellschaft für logistische Informationssysteme mbH is offering Pick by Robot, a plug-in robotics solution in its LUKE family that automates single-item picking directly within SAP EWM and runs 24/7.

AI image processing drives item recognition in round-the-clock operation

The system relies on AI- and deep-learning-based image processing for item recognition. IGZ says this delivers reliable identification and high process reliability across continuous operation.

Integrated tool changer widens the range of handled items

A built-in tool changer expands the spectrum of articles the robot can process. IGZ cites this as the source of the solution's flexibility.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- A successful OPC UA connection check shows only that a client can reach the endpoint. It does not prove the intended nodes are readable, monitored, mapped or written to the historian, according to a five-step troubleshooting workflow for industrial data pipelines.

The method starts with one known, changing point, traced from the OPC UA server to one expected historian table. Large tag lists hide the first failure.