Industrial Automation by Industry: How Plant Controls Change from Food Lines to Mines and Data Centers

A plant manager who moves from a beverage plant to a chemical site, or inherits a warehouse after years on packaging lines, finds familiar things in the panels: PLCs, drives, an operator interface (HMI), a managed switch, sometimes a distributed control system (DCS). Often the controller family is the same one. The hardware behind a can filler rated at 136,000 cans an hour is close kin to what runs a mine’s fixed plant, which one practitioner describes as “mainly dominated by the PLCs”, or a data center’s cooling, where another reports PLCs controlling 10 to 18 megawatt chillers.

What changes is everything around the controller. An integrator who had worked on breweries, cheese plants, water treatment, oil drilling, trains and grid switchgear summed it up on r/PLC in April 2025: on the controls side they are all basically the same, and the difference is the requirements, the safety evaluations and the customers.

That is this guide’s position: same controls, different rules. Four things decide how automation works in any industry:

• how the product is made;
• who regulates it;
• what a failure costs;
• who owns the machines and their code.

Read those four correctly and an unfamiliar plant makes sense within a week. Miss one and a capable team can deliver a project that fails its first audit, its first validation or its first turnaround.

Vladimir Romanov, Joltek’s founder, has worked on several sides of these lines:

• capital projects and new production lines for a global consumer goods manufacturer;
• maintenance and operations in high-volume food manufacturing, and a greenfield food plant expansion;
• chemical manufacturing and warehousing;
• equipment built for pharmaceutical plants, including reprogramming a machine inside a radiopharmaceutical production facility.

This guide to industrial automation by industry covers 39 industries in seven families, with standards and regulations checked in October 2026. It covers, in order:

• the four lenses, and the difference between process, batch, discrete and hybrid plants;
• the control stack from sensor to ERP, drawn for seven very different plants;
• who supplies industrial automation, and how big those suppliers are;
• the standards and regulators that apply across industries;
• an explorer that scores all 39 industries on the same four gauges;
• one section per family, from food lines to data centers;
• what changes when people move between industries, what changes for plants from 2026 to 2028, and where to start.

Readers who already know their industry can go straight to the explorer and jump to its section.

What changes in automation from one industry to the next?

Four things change from one industry to the next: how the product is made, who regulates it, what a failure costs and who owns the machines. The controllers, networks and software are largely the same everywhere. Anyone who understands those four lenses can read an unfamiliar plant, from a dairy to a refinery, within its first week.

The controllers are the wrong place to look for differences. IEC 61131-3, the PLC programming languages standard, now in its fourth edition (2025), applies to a brewery and a battery plant alike. The same Ethernet networks, drives and HMI software appear in a pharmaceutical suite and a sawmill. What differs is the setting each controller works in, and that setting is easiest to read through four lenses.

How the product is made

The first lens is production style: continuous, batch, discrete or hybrid. It sets the pace the controller works at and what a record means.

• A refinery’s controller works in minutes and hours.
• A can filler’s works in milliseconds.
• A pharmaceutical batch is judged by the record of every phase.

The next section covers the four styles in detail.

Who regulates it

The second lens is the regime: who can stop the plant, and what they inspect.

Sector	Who can stop the plant
Food	The Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service for meat and poultry
Chemicals and refining	OSHA’s process safety rule and EPA’s Risk Management Program
Pipelines	The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)
Mines	The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)
The grid	NERC, under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Nuclear plants	The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)

Some plants answer to a customer before any regulator. An automaker’s controls standard or an aerospace prime’s quality rules can be stricter than the law.

The reach of a rule is often narrower or wider than people expect:

• FDA’s food safety records are exempt from Part 11, the electronic records rule, unless another rule requires them.
• Dietary supplement records, kept under a different FDA rule, must comply with Part 11.
• FDA’s February 2026 guidance on Computer Software Assurance covers device production and quality system software. It does not cover drug plants, which still validate under Parts 210, 211 and 11.

What a failure costs

The third lens is consequence. It decides how much engineering goes into a change, how many people sign it and how it is tested.

Consequence	Example	What it changes in the controls
Safety	At BP Texas City in 2005, 15 people died when a tower overfilled during startup. Its level indicator showed the level falling, and the high-level alarm did not activate (CSB)	Independent safety layers, alarm management, startup procedures
Public	In 2021 an intruder used a US water plant’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to raise sodium hydroxide dosing. Staff caught it before harm (CISA)	Physical limits that a compromised controller cannot override
Product	In drug manufacturing, the quality unit must review and approve production records before a batch is released (21 CFR 211)	Records and audit trails that are part of the product
Money	Clorox’s net sales fell 20 percent in the quarter after its August 2023 cyberattack (Clorox)	Recovery plans for the systems that run orders and lines

Who owns the machines and their code

The fourth lens is ownership: who is allowed to change the code, whether the plant, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), a customer or a builder. It is the lens newcomers most often miss.

• Semiconductor fabs. The tool maker writes and owns the equipment controller software. The fab will not accept a tool for production until it passes tests for SEMI standards compliance.
• Injection molding. Machine builders ship their own controllers, so plants connect through OPC UA specifications such as EUROMAP 77 instead of rewriting logic.
• Automotive. Automakers publish controls standards that line builders must program to:
  • Ford’s Modular Control Program runs on Allen-Bradley ControlLogix;
  • a General Motors job posting names its GCCS and GCCH standards and Rockwell PLCs;
  • Volkswagen’s VASS standard is built on Siemens.
• Steel. The mill builder often supplies, and later replaces, the Level 2 process models. SMS group is replacing the Level 2 system on a Steel Dynamics hot strip mill it built in 1993.

Whoever owns the code, the plant still answers for the result. Joltek’s playbook on how plants, integrators and OEMs divide the work covers that relationship in depth.

Process, batch, discrete or hybrid: what kind of plant is it?

Continuous plants run material through without stopping, often for years between shutdowns. Batch plants make product in defined lots, each with its own record. Discrete plants build countable units from parts. Most food, beverage, consumer goods and pharmaceutical plants are hybrid: a process area feeds high-speed packaging under one roof, and each half is controlled differently.

Continuous

Continuous production moves material through the plant without interruption, usually around the clock with infrequent shutdowns. Refineries are the reference case:

• most run three to five years between turnarounds, planned shutdowns that last weeks to months;
• some chemical plants run one to two years without stopping, and blast furnaces four to ten;
• glass furnaces run a campaign of up to 16 years before a rebuild.

Control here means regulation: holding temperatures, pressures, levels and compositions steady for years. It also means moving between states safely, because startup and shutdown are the hard part. The Texas City tower overfilled during a startup.

Batch

Batch production makes product in defined amounts, one batch at a time, each with its own record. ISA-88, the batch control standard, addresses five functions:

• recipe management;
• scheduling;
• sequential control;
• regulatory control;
• safety interlocks.

Its central idea is keeping the recipe separate from the equipment, so one set of tanks and phases can make many products. The current ISA edition of Part 1 is ISA-88.00.01-2010. IEC published a second edition of its counterpart, IEC 61512-1, in February 2026.

Specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, beer and many food ingredients are made in batches.

Discrete

Discrete manufacturing builds countable units from a bill of materials and an assembly of parts. The controller’s job is motion, sequencing and verification: is the part present, is the bolt torqued, is the weld good. Every unit can carry a serial number. Traceability therefore means genealogy: which parts, which station, which settings, which shift.

Hybrid

A hybrid plant puts a process area in front of a discrete one under the same roof:

• a dairy pasteurizes milk continuously, then fills cartons;
• a brewery ferments in batches, then packages on high-speed lines;
• a battery plant mixes and coats electrodes as a process, then assembles cells as discrete units.

Rockwell Automation’s annual report sorts its customers into three groups:

• discrete: automotive, semiconductors, and e-commerce and warehousing;
• hybrid: food and beverage, life sciences, and tire;
• process: energy, mining and chemicals.

Analysts often skip the middle group. One market report files pharmaceutical and food and beverage under process, with no hybrid heading at all. Utilities get misfiled too: power and water are often grouped with process manufacturing, but NAICS places them in sector 22, Utilities, outside manufacturing.

The split matters because each half of a hybrid plant is controlled, staffed and regulated differently.

Speed and time at each end of the range

Plant	Rate or time	Source
Glass-bottle filler	Up to 80,000 bottles an hour	KHS
Can filler and seamer	Up to 136,000 cans an hour	KHS
Baby diaper machine	Up to 1,200 products a minute	JOA
Tissue machine	1,800 to 2,200 meters of paper a minute	Valmet
Sterile filling line	Up to 600 syringes, vials or cartridges a minute	Syntegon
Young-chicken slaughter line	140 birds a minute, the federal cap	eCFR
New auto assembly plant	100 vehicles an hour, nominal	Georgia EPD draft permit
Refinery	Three to five years between turnarounds	AFPM
Glass furnace	Up to 16 years per campaign	Glass melting furnace

Two numbers drive most control decisions:

• In discrete and packaging work, takt or line speed: the time the controller has per unit. A filler moving more than 2,000 cans a minute needs vision rejects and servo timing measured in milliseconds.
• In process work, residence time: how long material spends in a vessel, and how long a disturbance takes to show up. A kiln that responds over hours needs model-based control and patient operators.

Product changes follow the same split. Recipe-driven plants change products by loading new parameters. Part-number-driven plants change them by changing tooling, programs and fixtures.

What does the control stack look like in each industry?

Every industry fits the same five ISA-95 levels, from the physical process at level 0 to business systems at level 4. What changes is what sits at each level and who owns it. A refinery runs a DCS with a separate safety system, a car plant follows the automaker’s PLC standard, and a data center runs three separate facility systems.

The five levels

ISA-95, the enterprise-control integration standard, describes a plant in five levels. ISA’s public description gives each level a job:

• level 0 is the physical process;
• level 1 collects data and manipulates the process;
• level 2 monitors and supervises it;
• level 3 covers manufacturing execution and the other systems that manage operations;
• level 4 covers the business.

The model comes from the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture of the 1990s. ISA says the equipment hierarchy applies across discrete, continuous and logistics industries alike. The current Part 1 is ANSI/ISA-95.00.01-2025.

Level	What it does	Typical systems
4	Business planning and logistics	ERP, planning, quality management
3	Manufacturing operations	Manufacturing execution systems (MES), batch management, historians, laboratory systems
2	Monitoring and supervision	SCADA, HMI, DCS operator stations
1	Sensing and manipulation	PLCs, DCS controllers, safety controllers, drives
0	The physical process	Instruments, valves, motors, machines

Joltek’s guide to what ISA-95 asks of a plant in practice covers the standard itself. Here it is the frame for comparing industries. Level 3 is where the systems that run production live, along with the process historian.

Seven plants, one stack

The shape stays the same. The boxes, and the people who own them, change.

Plant	What is distinctive about its stack
A dairy plant	Built around a legally defined heat treatment, clean-in-place cycles and lot records, with continuous milk flow feeding discrete filling. Plant engineering owns the process and CIP logic; the filler and packer makers own their PLC code
A sterile fill-finish suite	Grade A barrier equipment, continuous environmental monitoring and electronic records that every level keeps validated. The filling-line maker owns the line PLC; it and the suite DCS are both validated
A specialty chemical plant	The safety instrumented system sits beside the DCS, with its own logic solver and its own owner, and a batch manager runs ISA-88 recipes above the DCS
A car body shop	The automaker’s controls standard fixes the PLC library, templates and screens the line builder must program to. It is the most standard-driven stack of the seven
A water utility	Many unattended sites on radio or cellular links. A default password at the edge sets the risk, and physical limits such as pump sizing are the last safeguard
A data center	Three facility systems, the building management system (BMS), the electrical power monitoring system (EPMS) and the data center infrastructure management software (DCIM), must act together. Equipment makers ship the controllers and a commissioning agent proves them as one system
An open-pit mine and concentrator	Two domains on one site: a fleet whose dispatch and autonomy belong to the truck maker, and a concentrator run like a process plant

Where the DCS, the PLC and the OEM controller live

Industry	Level 1 and 2 control is usually	Who owns the code	Evidence
Food and beverage	PLC lines plus OEM machine controllers; DCS or batch systems in the brewhouse, CIP and refrigeration	The plant for process; equipment makers for machines	Plants Vladimir has worked in
Pharmaceuticals	A DCS with a batch engine, plus vendor skids with their own PLCs	The plant for the DCS; skid makers for skids; both validated	Vladimir’s work on equipment built for pharma plants
Chemicals	A DCS, plus a separate safety instrumented system	Controls engineering for the DCS; a separate safety owner for the SIS	IEC 61511 separation practice
Refining and pipelines	A DCS in plants; SCADA with remote terminal units on pipelines and wells	The operator	CSB, 49 CFR 195.446
Power generation	A DCS, plus the turbine maker’s own controls	The plant and the turbine maker	Emerson, GE Vernova
Mining	DCS or PLC in the concentrator; autonomy systems on the fleet	The mine for the plant; the truck maker for the fleet	Rockwell, r/mining
Automotive	Station PLCs, safety PLCs and robot controllers, to the automaker’s standard	The line builder, to the automaker’s rules	Ford, GM and Volkswagen sources above
Semiconductors	Tool controllers	The tool maker	Cimetrix
Water and wastewater	PLCs and SCADA, with remote terminal units (RTUs) at remote sites	The utility, often with a regional integrator	CISA
Data centers	BMS, EPMS and equipment controllers	Controls contractors and equipment makers	Uptime and vendor sources in the data center section

Where batch control lives

Batch management is a good example of one function landing at different levels:

• In smaller plants, the batch manager sits in the control layer, inside or beside the DCS or PLC.
• In larger plants that need the scale, batching moves up to the MES layer, where it can coordinate many units, lines and records.

Vladimir has seen both arrangements, and neither is wrong. The choice follows the plant’s size and its records burden.

The DCS and PLC worlds also overlap more than their reputations suggest:

• Rockwell positions its PlantPAx distributed control system as the core system for mineral processing.
• An integrator built refrigeration optimization for a frozen-food maker on the same platform.
• A New Jersey beverage plant runs ISA-88 batch control inside Ignition, a SCADA platform.

Who supplies industrial automation, and how big are they?

A small group of companies supplies most control platforms: Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, ABB, Emerson, Honeywell, Mitsubishi Electric and Yokogawa, with Omron, Fanuc and Beckhoff strong in machines and Inductive Automation in software. No public source measures market share by industry. Often the automaker, machine builder or validation history decides a plant’s platform.

The layers of supply

Industrial automation is bought in layers, and different companies lead in each one:

• Control platforms: distributed control systems for large process plants; PLCs, motion and robots for machines and lines.
• Supervisory and operations software: SCADA, HMI, historians and MES.
• Facility systems: building management and power monitoring.
• Machines: OEMs and machine builders whose equipment arrives with its own controls.
• Engineering and installation: integrators, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firms and, for many plants, distributors. Rockwell’s own annual report says that in North America “a large percentage” of its sales go through distributors.

How big the suppliers are

The table shows what each company reports for its automation business. These are company sizes, not market shares. Every segment covers a different mix of hardware, software and services, and no public source measures automation share by industry.

Company	Business reported	Fiscal year	Revenue	Source
Siemens	Digital Industries	Year to 2025-09-30	EUR 17,788,000,000	Siemens
Emerson	Whole company: Intelligent Devices plus Software and Control	Year to 2025-09-30	$18,016,000,000	Emerson
Honeywell	Industrial Automation (Building Automation adds $7,367,000,000)	2025	$9,401,000,000	10-K
Rockwell Automation	Whole company	Year to 2025-09-30	$8,342,000,000	10-K
ABB	Automation business area (Robotics, being sold, adds $2,331,000,000)	2025	$8,084,000,000	ABB
Schneider Electric	Industrial Automation	2025	EUR 7,022,000,000	Schneider Electric
Mitsubishi Electric	Factory Automation Systems	Year to 2026-03-31	JPY 875,600,000,000	Mitsubishi Electric
Fanuc	Whole company	Year to 2026-03-31	JPY 857,831,000,000	Fanuc
Yokogawa	Whole company (Control segment JPY 565,523,000,000)	Year to 2026-03-31	JPY 604,829,000,000	Yokogawa
Omron	Industrial Automation Business	Year to 2026-03-31	JPY 409,478,000,000	Omron filing
Beckhoff	Whole company (private)	2025	EUR 1,240,000,000	Beckhoff
Inductive Automation	Private; publishes no revenue	n/a	Says 69 percent of the Fortune 100 use its software	Inductive Automation

Two of these companies changed shape in 2026:

• Honeywell spun off its aerospace business on June 29, 2026. It now reports as an automation company with three segments.
• ABB agreed to sell its robotics division to SoftBank for an enterprise value of $5,375,000,000, and expects the sale to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Rockwell had not yet reported fiscal 2026 when this guide was checked. Its first nine months came to $6,657,000,000.

Rockwell’s own list of major competitors is a fair map of the top tier: Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric, Emerson, Mitsubishi Electric, Honeywell and Dassault Systèmes. The last is a software company, a sign of where competition is moving.

When the customer picks the platform

In automotive, the PLC brand is often decided in the automaker’s engineering office, not in the plant:

• Ford named Rockwell its “vehicle operations primary controls and solutions provider” for three electric vehicle sites in 2022. Ford’s Modular Control Program for conveyors runs on ControlLogix. A Ford controls supervisor described it as “standard across Ford”.
• General Motors keeps its controls standards private. Its own job postings ask for knowledge of its GCCS and GCCH standards and of Rockwell controllers.
• Volkswagen’s VASS standard underpins its Zwickau electric-car lines, which use Siemens controllers and TIA Portal.

None of these standards is public, so the evidence comes from vendor releases, trade press and job postings. A supplier that builds lines for several automakers maintains several control standards at once.

Builders who own their machines’ controls

In many industries the most important “automation vendor” is the company that built the machine:

Industry	Builders	What the evidence shows
Food and beverage	Tetra Pak, GEA, JBT Marel	2025 revenue of EUR 12,350,000,000, EUR 5,495,000,000 and $3,798,200,000 (GEA, JBT Marel)
Automotive paint shops	Dürr	The company states a global market share of 50 to 60 percent in paint shop construction and application technology (Dürr)
Pulp and paper	Valmet	Its own DNA distributed control system and IQ quality control systems (Valmet)
Steel	Primetals Technologies, SMS group, Danieli	Level 2 process models on furnaces, casters and mills (Primetals, Danieli)
Mining fleets	Komatsu, Caterpillar	More than 900 autonomous trucks on Komatsu’s system (Komatsu); more than 13 billion tonnes hauled by Caterpillar’s (Caterpillar)
Data centers	Vertiv	2025 net sales of $10,229,900,000, up 27.7 percent (Vertiv)
Warehousing	Symbotic	Walmart was about 85 percent of its fiscal 2025 revenue (10-K)
Tobacco	Körber	Says its machinery makes two-thirds of the world’s filter cigarettes; that is the company’s own claim (Körber)

For the plant, the practical question is who can change the code, and on what terms. That belongs in a scope of work an integrator can deliver against and in every machine purchase contract.

How vendors divide the industries

Vendors do not agree on how to cut the world into industries. On their own US websites, Rockwell lists 20 industries, Siemens 30 and Inductive Automation 5. Mining and water and wastewater are the only two that nearly every vendor names. Siemens has no food and beverage entry, only consumer packaged goods, and none of the nine lists tobacco or cannabis. The table shows which vendors give each industry its own page.

Industry	Rockwell	Siemens	Emerson	Mitsubishi	Yokogawa	Honeywell	Schneider	ABB	Inductive	Vendors
Mining	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		8 of 9
Water and wastewater	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	8 of 9
Food and beverage	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		7 of 9
Life sciences and pharma	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes			7 of 9
Oil and gas	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial			7 of 9
Power generation and utilities	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		7 of 9
Automotive and tire	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes		Yes	7 of 9
Data centers		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	7 of 9
Chemicals	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Partial			6 of 9
Metals	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes			6 of 9
Semiconductors and electronics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes			6 of 9
Marine and shipbuilding	Yes	Yes	Yes		Partial		Yes	Yes		6 of 9
Machinery and machine builders		Yes	Partial	Yes	Partial	Partial	Yes			6 of 9
Pulp and paper	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes				5 of 9
Batteries		Yes		Yes	Yes	Partial				4 of 9
Solar, wind, hydrogen, storage		Yes			Yes	Yes			Yes	4 of 9
Commercial buildings and healthcare		Yes		Yes		Yes	Yes			4 of 9
Cement	Yes	Yes				Partial				3 of 9
Aerospace and defense	Yes	Yes	Yes							3 of 9
Warehousing and logistics	Yes	Yes		Yes						3 of 9
Consumer packaged goods	Yes	Yes								2 of 9
Printing	Yes							Yes		2 of 9
Packaging			Yes							1 of 9
Medical devices				Yes						1 of 9
Glass		Yes								1 of 9
Textiles	Yes									1 of 9
Entertainment	Yes									1 of 9
Nuclear					Partial					1 of 9
Tobacco										0 of 9
Cannabis										0 of 9

Checked on each vendor’s US industry index on 2026-10-24. “Partial” means the industry appears under a parent page. ABB’s index renders with JavaScript, so its column rests on direct page checks and may be incomplete. Honeywell’s column covers its process automation site.

Which standards and regulations apply across industries?

A core set applies almost everywhere: IEC 61131-3 for PLC programming, ISA-88 and ISA-95 for structure, NFPA 79 and UL 508A for machine and panel wiring, ISO 13849-1 for machine safety, IEC 61511 for hazardous processes and ISA/IEC 62443 for security. Each industry then adds its regulator, such as FDA, OSHA, EPA, PHMSA, NERC or the NRC.

Standards that apply almost everywhere

Editions were checked in October 2026.

Standard	Current edition	What it governs
IEC 61131-3	Edition 4.0, May 2025; the 2013 edition was withdrawn the same day	PLC programming languages
ISA-88 and IEC 61512-1	ISA-88.00.01-2010; IEC 61512-1 second edition, February 2026	Batch control models and terms
ISA-95 and IEC 62264	ANSI/ISA-95.00.01-2025	Enterprise-control integration, levels 0 to 4
ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682	ISA-18.2-2016; IEC 62682:2022	Alarm management
ISA-101.01	2015	HMI design for process automation
ISA/IEC 62443	ANSI/ISA-62443-2-1-2024 and other parts	Security of industrial automation and control systems
IEC 61508	Edition 2.0, 2010	Functional safety, the base standard
IEC 61511, adopted in the US as ANSI/ISA-61511	Edition 2.1, 2017; US adoption 2018	Safety instrumented systems in the process industry
ISO 12100	2010, marked for revision	Machinery risk assessment
ISO 13849-1	Edition 4, April 2023	Safety-related parts of machine control systems
IEC 62061	Edition 2.0, 2021, with Amendment 1 of 2024	Functional safety of machine control systems
IEC 60204-1 and NFPA 79	IEC edition 6.0 (2016, amended 2021); NFPA 79 2024, with 2027 in development	Electrical equipment of machines
UL 508A and CSA C22.2 No. 286	UL 508A Edition 3 (2018, revised June 2025); CSA C22.2 No. 286:23	Industrial control panels
NFPA 70E and CSA Z462	NFPA 70E 2027; CSA Z462:24	Electrical safety in the workplace
OSHA 1910.147 and CSA Z460	1910.147 (1989, last amended 2011); CSA Z460-20	Lockout and control of hazardous energy
ISO 10218-1 and -2, ANSI/A3 R15.06	2025 editions; R15.06-2025 aligned to them	Industrial robot and robot cell safety
IEC 62541 (OPC UA)	IEC 62541-1:2025	OPC UA interoperability
PackML (ISA-TR88.00.02)	2022	Packaging machine states
Module Type Package (MTP)	MTP Specification 2.0, January 2026; the VDI/VDE/NAMUR 2658 sheet shows “withdrawal announced”; IEC 63280 in preparation	Integrating modular process units
IEC 61850	2026 series pack	Substation and power utility communication
IEEE 1815 (DNP3)	2012, listed as inactive-reserved since March 2023, with a revision project open	Utility telemetry protocol
IEC 61499	Edition 2.0, 2012	Distributed function block architecture

Three rows in that table changed recently enough that many plant documents cite the old edition:

• IEC 61131-3 is now in its fourth edition.
• NFPA 70E is now at its 2027 edition.
• The Module Type Package, the modular-plant interface from NAMUR and its partners, reached specification 2.0 in January 2026 and is moving to IEC.

DNP3 is still everywhere in utility telemetry. What changed is only the status of its IEEE document.

Hazardous areas: three systems

A plant that handles flammable gas, vapor or dust classifies its hazardous areas under one of three systems:

• United States: the National Electrical Code, NFPA 70, now in its 2026 edition. Hazardous locations are covered in Article 500 and the articles that follow.
• Canada: the Canadian Electrical Code, Part I, 26th edition (2024). Section 18 uses the zone system.
• International and EU:
  • the IEC 60079 series, republished as a complete series pack in October 2026, with IECEx certification;
  • in the EU, the ATEX equipment directive 2014/34/EU, applicable since April 20, 2016.

Equipment certified for one system is not automatically accepted under another. That matters to any machine builder shipping across borders.

Regulators by family

Regulator	Industries	The rule that most affects automation
FDA	Pharma, biotech, devices; some food	21 CFR Part 11, electronic records; 211.68, automated equipment in drug GMP; Part 117, food preventive controls; Part 820, the device QMSR
USDA FSIS	Meat, poultry, egg products	9 CFR 416 and 417, sanitation and HACCP
CFIA	Food in Canada	Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, preventive controls and traceability
Health Canada	Drugs and devices in Canada	Food and Drug Regulations Part C, Division 2; Medical Devices Regulations
OSHA	Manufacturing generally; refining and chemicals	1910.119, process safety management; 1910.212, machine guarding; 1910.147, lockout
EPA	Chemicals, refining, ammonia refrigeration, water, heavy industry	40 CFR 68, the Risk Management Program; America’s Water Infrastructure Act risk assessments; 40 CFR 63, air toxics by source category
PHMSA	Oil and gas pipelines	49 CFR 192.631 and 195.446, control room management
TSA	Pipelines and rail	Security directives, reissued in 2026
BSEE	Offshore oil and gas	30 CFR 250 Subpart S, safety and environmental management systems
MSHA	Mines and quarries	30 CFR 56.14105, repairs only with power off and secured; proximity detection underground
NRC and CNSC	Nuclear power	10 CFR 73.54, cyber protection of digital systems; CSA N290.7 in Canada
FERC and NERC	Power generation, transmission, grid	NERC CIP standards
Canada Energy Regulator	Federally regulated pipelines	Onshore Pipeline Regulations, pipeline control system and security program
SEC	Every US public company	Form 8-K Item 1.05, a material cyber incident disclosed within four business days
Department of War (CMMC)	Defense supply chain	32 CFR Part 170, the CMMC program
European Commission	Machine builders and product makers selling into the EU	The Machinery Regulation, the Cyber Resilience Act and the NIS2 Directive

Security has moved into the rules

In 2026, control system security is written into regulation in most of the families in this guide:

• The grid: NERC’s internal network monitoring standard, CIP-015-1, becomes effective on October 1, 2028 for control centers.
• Pipelines and rail: TSA reissued its directives in 2026.
• Ports and vessels: the Coast Guard’s cyber rule requires covered vessels and facilities to submit a cybersecurity plan by July 16, 2027.
• Products sold in the EU: the Cyber Resilience Act’s reporting obligations began September 11, 2026.
• Public companies: must disclose a material incident within four business days.

ISA/IEC 62443 is the common vocabulary underneath most of these rules. Joltek’s guide to ISA/IEC 62443 for plant leaders covers how it applies plant by plant.

Standards meet the plant floor at one moment above all: the factory acceptance test. A requirement that is not in the specification will not be tested there.

How do the 39 industries compare?

Scored on the same four gauges, the 39 industries spread widely. Pharmaceuticals and nuclear power carry the heaviest documentation, chemical and nuclear plants the highest hazard, beverage, consumer goods and tobacco lines the fastest pace, and grids, water systems, fabs and data centers the least tolerance for an unplanned stop. The explorer filters them by family, style and regime.

How the gauges work

Each industry is scored from 1 to 5 on four gauges. The scores are Joltek’s editorial judgment, made on a fixed scale so that 39 very different industries can be compared fairly. Each score carries a one-sentence basis, shown in the explorer.

Gauge	1	3	5
Documentation load	Normal engineering records only	An audited quality or food safety system (GFSI, IATF 16949, AS9100)	Validated systems where the electronic record is part of the product (GMP pharma, nuclear safety)
Hazard	Ordinary machine and electrical hazards	Significant hazards in parts of the site (ammonia refrigeration, combustible dust, molten metal in one area)	A site-wide major-hazard process (process safety management in chemicals, nuclear)
Pace	Slow continuous or facility dynamics, in minutes to hours	Cycles of seconds (assembly stations, batch phases)	High-speed discrete, hundreds to thousands of units a minute
Uptime pressure	Stops are routine and cheap to recover	An unplanned stop costs a shift’s output or a batch	Any unplanned stop is a safety, public-service or very high-cost event

The Industry Explorer

What the spread shows

Four patterns stand out:

• Hybrid and fast. Food and beverage, consumer goods and tobacco score 5 on pace and 3 on uptime pressure. Their lines are among the fastest machines in industry, but a stop usually costs a shift of output, not a public emergency.
• Continuous and hazardous. Oil and gas, chemicals, nuclear, metals and pulp and paper score 4 or 5 on hazard and uptime pressure. Most score 1 to 3 on pace; rolling mills are the fast exception. Their controllers move carefully, because the material is dangerous and a stop is expensive or unsafe.
• Distributed and public. Water, the grid and transport infrastructure score 5 on uptime pressure, because an outage reaches the public directly.
• The paperwork outliers. Pharmaceuticals and nuclear score 5 on documentation. Medical devices, cannabis and nutraceuticals, and aerospace score 4. In these industries a code change is also a records event.

How big each industry is

By sales, the largest US manufacturing subsectors in 2024 were:

Subsector	2024 sales	Share of US manufacturing sales
Transportation equipment	$1,104,575,408,000	15.8 percent
Food	$1,054,261,701,000	15.1 percent
Chemicals	$918,163,595,000	13.2 percent
Petroleum and coal products	$714,967,586,000	10.2 percent

Source: the Census Bureau’s Annual Integrated Economic Survey.

Employment ranks the subsectors very differently. Food is the largest manufacturing employer, at 1,702,155 people. Petroleum and coal products employ only 98,536, by far the highest sales per employee on the list.

Canada’s picture is similar. Food was its largest manufacturing subsector in 2025, at $158,131,018,000, 18.6 percent of shipments.

Utilities, data centers, warehouses and transport sit outside these manufacturing figures entirely.

How is automation different in food, beverage and consumer goods?

Food, beverage and consumer goods plants are hybrid. A process area mixes, cooks, ferments or pasteurizes, then packaging lines fill and pack, sometimes at more than a thousand units a minute. Hygiene rules shape the hardware, changeovers shape the economics, and many machines arrive from OEMs with their own controllers and code.

This family moves the most units past the fewest people. A glass-bottle filler can run 80,000 bottles an hour and a baby diaper machine 1,200 products a minute. Rockwell Automation’s own annual report files food and beverage as a “hybrid” end market, next to life sciences and tire, not with process or discrete.

Three things set the family apart:

• Hygiene shapes the hardware. Stainless enclosures, washdown ratings, and sensors designed to be cleaned rather than merely sealed.
• Changeovers shape the economics. A line that runs dozens of products loses availability every time it switches.
• The machines come from many builders. In the plants Vladimir has worked in, one packaging line can carry a filler, capper, labeler, case packer and palletizer from different builders, each with its own controller. The plant’s automation work is making them run as one line.

Food and beverage

Hybrid · FDA, USDA FSIS, OSHA, EPA, CFIA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 3 · Pace 5 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Dairy, meat and poultry, bakery and snacks, confectionery, brewing, distilling, soft drinks and pet food, under NAICS 311 and 3121.

• United States: in the 2022 Economic Census, food plants shipped $1,039,160,583,000 with 1,646,880 employees, and beverage plants shipped $124,092,068,000 with 257,357.
• Canada: food manufacturers earned C$167,803,428,000 in 2024.

How it runs. Process first, then packaging.

• Some process steps are written into regulation as control specifications. Federal rules define pasteurized milk as every particle held at 161 degrees F for 15 seconds, or 145 degrees F for 30 minutes, so the timing and temperature logic is the product’s legal definition.
• The packaging half is about speed. USDA caps young-chicken lines at 140 birds a minute, and a February 2026 proposal would raise that to 175.

The control stack. Most lines are PLC-based, with machine controllers supplied by the equipment makers. DCS-class or batch systems appear in the brewhouse, CIP, refrigeration and thermal-process areas. Many plants hold several controller brands, inherited through acquisitions.

The modern version can sit on one software platform: AriZona Beverages’ Keasbey, New Jersey plant runs SCADA, MES and ISA-88 batch control inside Ignition, with a link to SAP.

The rules.

• Human food: FDA’s preventive controls rule, 21 CFR Part 117, requires a written food safety plan. Its records are exempt from Part 11 unless another rule requires them, which surprises people who arrive from pharma.
• Meat and poultry: USDA FSIS enforces HACCP under 9 CFR Part 417.
• Traceability: the 2022 FSMA food traceability rule set a compliance date of January 20, 2026. FDA has proposed moving it to July 20, 2028, and Congress has barred FDA from spending funds to enforce it before then.
• Ammonia refrigeration: large systems fall under OSHA process safety management and EPA’s Risk Management Program at 10,000 pounds.
• Combustible dust: now covered by a single standard, NFPA 660 (2025), which absorbed NFPA 61, 652 and 654.
• Certification schemes: SQF Edition 10 takes effect no earlier than January 1, 2027. FSSC 22000 Version 7 upgrade audits begin May 1, 2027.
• Canada: the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations require a license and a written preventive control plan.

Who supplies it.

• Control platforms: Rockwell Automation’s 10-K names Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric, Emerson and Mitsubishi Electric among its competitors.
• Process and packaging machines: builders such as Tetra Pak, GEA and JBT Marel, each bringing its own controls. Their 2025 revenue was EUR 12,350,000,000, EUR 5,495,000,000 and $3,798,200,000.

On the floor.

• A washdown rating is not a hygiene rating. IP69K comes from a road-vehicle standard, ISO 20653, and proves a device survives a pressure wash. 3-A Sanitary Standards cover whether it can be cleaned. Practitioners make the same point, especially for the process area.
• The data is often missing when it is needed most. After a 2024 ammonia release at a food plant in Sterling, Virginia, the Chemical Safety Board recommended an electronic process data historian and ammonia-specific alarms.

Words to know.

• CIP (clean-in-place): automated cleaning of tanks, pipes and heat exchangers without disassembly. The PLC sequences and logs timed rinse, caustic, acid and sanitizer steps.
• Kill step: a validated cook, retort or pasteurizing step that reduces a pathogen by a stated amount.
• Allergen changeover: the cleaning and verification between products with different allergens, so the next product is not cross-contacted.

Go deeper: the food and beverage automation guide, automation and modernization support for food, beverage and CPG plants and how food plants measure OEE.

Consumer packaged goods

Hybrid · FDA, EPA, CPSC, OSHA, Health Canada · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 5 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Household and personal care products, cosmetics and paper goods. The NAICS codes are:

• soap and detergent (325611);
• toilet preparations (325620);
• tissue and diapers (322291, or 322120 when the plant makes its own paper).

US soap, cleaning compound and toilet preparation plants shipped $82,380,047,000 in 2022, with 108,203 employees.

How it runs. Hybrid again, at the extremes.

• Process: powder detergent is made in spray towers 12 to 38 meters tall. Slurry is sprayed at 600 to 1,000 psi into air at 315 to 400 degrees C.
• Converting and filling: a baby diaper machine is rated at up to 1,200 products and 600 meters of web a minute. Aerosol fillers reach up to 600 containers a minute.

The control stack.

• Process areas: PLCs or a DCS run blending, spray drying and paper machines.
• Filling, converting and case packing: servo-driven machine controllers run them, often supplied by the equipment maker.

The rules. One site can answer to three US regimes at once:

• Drugs: antiperspirants and fluoride toothpastes are drugs as well as cosmetics. Drug GMP in 21 CFR Part 211 includes 211.68, on automated and computer-controlled equipment.
• Pesticides: disinfectants are pesticides, and EPA requires the establishment that makes them to register.
• Cosmetics: they fall under the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, signed December 29, 2022. Its manufacturing practice rule had not been proposed as of October 2026. Until it is, buyers audit against ISO 22716:2007, which ISO confirmed in 2022.

In the EU, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies from August 12, 2026. Its recycled-content minimums are calculated per manufacturing plant and year.

On the floor.

• Changeovers decide the economics. On a line that runs hundreds of SKUs, availability is lost between products, not during them. Joltek’s case study of a line speed-up on a high-volume consumer goods line shows where the time goes.
• When the systems go down, the plant can still run, slowly. After its August 2023 cyberattack, Clorox operated with manual workarounds and reported first-quarter net sales down 20 percent.

Words to know.

• Spray-drying tower: a tall tower where detergent slurry is sprayed into hot air to make dry granules. It is the plant’s largest dust source.
• Changeover: switching a line from one product, size or format to the next.
• Co-man: a contract manufacturer that makes and packs a brand owner’s product to the owner’s formula and quality agreement.

Go deeper: the CPG automation guide, which covers the rules, hazards and machine builders of household, personal care and paper goods plants.

Packaging and converting

Hybrid · FDA, OSHA, EPA, state EPR agencies, European Commission · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Boxes, cartons, bags, film, labels, bottles and cans, across a dozen NAICS codes, plus the packaging machinery makers in 333993. In 2022:

• US corrugated box plants shipped $57,188,311,000;
• all converted paper products shipped $137,803,768,000;
• packaging machinery makers shipped $10,087,435,000.

How it runs. Web and sheet processes, at speeds the builders rate:

• corrugator components at up to 1,500 feet a minute;
• a corrugator line at up to 56,000 square meters an hour;
• a central-impression flexo press at up to 600 meters a minute.

Beckhoff says printing presses are often fitted with more than 100 rotating, positioning or lifting axes. Web tension and registration therefore drive the control design.

The control stack. Mostly the builder’s. Press and corrugator makers sell their own controls and connectivity, such as Fosber’s controls suite and BOBST Connect. The plant’s work is connecting machines from different builders. Joltek’s case study of a converting line running mixed Omron and Rockwell controls shows what that takes.

The rules.

• Machine states: PackML is the machine state model OMAC developed and ISA adopted as ISA-TR88.00.02-2022. It gives every machine the same states.
• OPC UA: OPC 30050 maps PackML to OPC UA. OPC UA FX controller certification began in November 2024.
• Machine safety: ANSI/PMMI B155.1-2023, plus OSHA’s machine guarding (1910.212) and lockout (1910.147) rules.
• Food-contact packaging: plants that supply food are audited under BRCGS Packaging Materials Issue 7.

Who supplies it. A consolidating industry. International Paper completed its acquisition of DS Smith on January 31, 2025, and Amcor completed its merger with Berry Global on April 30, 2025.

Words to know.

• Corrugator: the line that makes corrugated board by fluting a medium, gluing it between liners, then slitting and cutting the sheets.
• Web tension: the pull on moving paper, film or foil, held constant so the web neither stretches nor wrinkles.
• Registration: alignment of printed colors with each other and with the cut, held at full press speed.

Machine builders as an industry are covered with the discrete family.

Tobacco

Hybrid · FDA, TTB, Health Canada, European Commission · Documentation 3 · Hazard 2 · Pace 5 · Uptime pressure 3

Tobacco has few plants and large output. In 2022, 144 US plants shipped $50,905,423,000, about $4,449,000 per employee.

• Machines: makers and packers run at high speed and are largely specified, programmed and supported by the machine builder. Körber says its machinery is used to make two-thirds of the world’s filter cigarettes; that is the company’s own claim.
• US regulation: FDA has regulated tobacco manufacturing since the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, with inspections every two years.
• The EU record: Directive 2014/40/EU requires every pack to carry an identifier naming the facility, the machine and the shift that made it. The packaging machine’s identity is part of the product.

Words to know:

• Unique identifier: the code on each pack that records where, when and on which machine it was made.
• Cut filler: tobacco leaf that has been stemmed, blended, cut and conditioned, ready to feed a cigarette maker.
• Track and trace: following each pack from the factory to the first retail outlet.

Go deeper: how EU tobacco traceability reaches the packing line.

Cannabis, hemp and nutraceuticals

Batch · FDA, DEA, state cannabis regulators, Health Canada · Documentation 4 · Hazard 2 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 2

NAICS has no code for cannabis manufacturing. Supplements sit in 325411 and 325412. The plants are small, built from packaged extraction, blending, filling and encapsulating equipment.

What surprises newcomers is how far the records rules reach. Under 21 CFR Part 111:

• Equipment changes: a supplement maker must control automated equipment and software so that changes are approved by quality control and made only by authorized people (111.30).
• Electronic records: these must comply with Part 11 (111.605(c)).

That is a stricter records regime than a food plant’s.

Cannabis adds tracking and federal change:

• State tracking: systems such as California’s seed-to-sale system run by METRC.
• Federal scheduling: on April 28, 2026 the DEA moved FDA-approved marijuana drugs and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III.
• Canada: the Cannabis Regulations require license holders to report monthly to Health Canada, even with no sales.

Words to know:

• Seed-to-sale: state-mandated tracking of each plant and product from propagation to retail.
• Master manufacturing record: the written specification for each supplement formulation and batch size.
• Total THC: THC plus THCA counted together, as the 2025 federal hemp amendments do.

How is automation different in pharmaceuticals and medical devices?

Life sciences plants make product under validation: the batch record, the audit trail and the approved recipe are part of what the regulator inspects. Pharmaceutical plants run batch control under 21 CFR Parts 11 and 211 and EU GMP Annex 1, and device plants run validated assembly under FDA’s Quality Management System Regulation, in force since February 2, 2026.

Validation is the defining cost of this family. A control system in a GMP plant is not finished when it works. It is finished when the plant holds documented evidence that it does what it is meant to do, every time, and that nobody can change it without leaving a trace. One practitioner puts documentation at 40 to 60 percent of a pharma automation project. That cost makes plants conservative: once a platform is validated, changing it means validating again.

Pharmaceuticals and biotech

Batch · FDA, Health Canada, European Commission, NRC and CNSC for radiopharmaceuticals · Documentation 5 · Hazard 3 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. NAICS 3254 covers four groups:

• bulk medicinals (325411);
• finished dose forms such as tablets and vials (325412);
• biologics, vaccines and gene therapies (325414);
• in-vitro diagnostic substances (325413).

There is no separate code for contract manufacturers.

Country	Year	Segment	Value	Employees
US	2022	All pharmaceutical and medicine plants	$234,230,172,000	304,238
US	2022	Preparations	$149,880,541,000
US	2022	Biologics	$47,322,287,000
Canada	2024	All pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturers	C$17,704,023,000

US figures are shipments from the 2022 Economic Census. Canada’s figure is revenue.

How it runs.

• Mostly batch. Continuous manufacturing is now defined in ICH Q13, adopted in November 2022, as the continuous feeding, transformation and removal of material.
• Sterile filling runs in the cleanest air in industry. EU GMP Annex 1 limits a Grade A zone to 3,520 particles per cubic meter at 0.5 micrometers or larger. It also bars sinks and drains from Grade A and B areas.
• The lines are still fast. Inside a gloveless isolator, a filling line can still handle 600 units a minute.

The control stack.

• The plant DCS with a batch engine runs reactors, bioreactors, buffer preparation and utilities.
• Vendor skids, such as chromatography, filtration, filling, tablet presses and packaging, arrive with their own PLCs and are integrated upward. Vladimir has seen that split from the equipment side, on machines built for pharmaceutical plants.

Vendors sell GMP features into the platform itself. Emerson refers to “validated DeltaV control systems with built-in audit trails”. Siemens lists “GMP-ready audit trails and eSignatures” for SIMATIC PCS 7 V10.0.

The rules.

• US drug GMP, 21 CFR 211.68: automated equipment is allowed if it is routinely calibrated and checked on a written program, and only authorized people may change master production records. Under 211.188, the batch record must name the person who checks a significant step performed by automated equipment. Under 211.192, the quality unit must approve the records before release.
• Electronic records, 21 CFR Part 11 (1997): systems must be validated and keep “secure, computer-generated, time-stamped audit trails”.
• Data integrity: FDA’s 2018 guidance treats each computerized GMP workflow as an intended use to be validated, in proportion to risk.
• Not the device rule: FDA’s Computer Software Assurance guidance covers device software only.
• Europe: Annex 1 has been fully applicable since August 25, 2024. Annex 11 on computerized systems is still the 2011 version. A revised Annex 11 and a new Annex 22 on artificial intelligence went to public consultation from July to October 2025 and had not been adopted when this guide was checked.
• Canada: Health Canada interprets drug GMP in GUI-0001.
• Serialization: under the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act, FDA’s exemptions for manufacturers, wholesalers and larger dispensers ended in 2025. Only small dispensers remain exempt, until November 27, 2027. The EU’s unique identifier rules have applied since February 9, 2019.

On the floor. The record is part of the product. A batch is not released until quality has reviewed its production records. A controller that drops an event, or an HMI with a shared login, is therefore a release problem, not only an IT problem.

What changed in 2026.

• Tariffs: a 100 percent Section 232 duty on patented pharmaceuticals took effect on July 31, 2026 for named companies and on September 29 for others. The rate is 20 percent for companies with approved onshoring plans.
• Cyber: West Pharmaceutical Services, a supplier of elastomer closures, detected an intrusion on May 4, 2026 and took systems offline globally. By May 20 it had restarted manufacturing, receiving and shipping at all sites.

Words to know.

• Grade A: the cleanest EU cleanroom grade, used for aseptic filling.
• Process qualification: stage 2 of FDA process validation, where the commercial process is shown to make acceptable batches reproducibly.
• Audit trail: the secure, time-stamped record of who created, changed or deleted an electronic record.

Labs. Laboratories automate with their own standards:

• SiLA, a consortium whose members include Roche, Novartis, Tecan and Promega;
• LADS, the OPC UA specification for laboratory and analytical devices, published as OPC 30500-1 in November 2023.

Lab systems fall under Part 11 where FDA records are involved, CLIA for clinical testing, and OSHA’s laboratory standard.

Radiopharmaceuticals. These add a second regulator and a clock:

• The software is part of the product. PET drugs have their own GMP rule, 21 CFR Part 212, effective December 12, 2011. Its definition of a PET drug includes the “electronic synthesizer, or other apparatus or computer program” used to prepare it.
• Release runs ahead of testing. Half-lives run from minutes to hours, so FDA notes that recalls are “usually impossible”. Part 212 lets a batch be released before sterility testing finishes, as long as the test starts within 30 hours of production.
• The material is licensed. The radioactive material needs a license from the NRC or, in an Agreement State, from the state. Indiana became one on September 30, 2026.
• Exposure is limited by law. Licensees must keep doses “as low as is reasonably achievable”.
• In Canada, the CNSC licenses both the material and the accelerators.

Vladimir has reprogrammed a machine inside a radiopharmaceutical production facility. Work like that runs under both regimes at once: GMP change control for the code, and dose limits on the time people spend near the equipment.

Two Joltek pages go further: version control and audit trails in regulated plants, and a motion platform modernization in a regulated plant.

Medical devices and diagnostics

Discrete · FDA, Health Canada, European Commission and notified bodies, EPA for ethylene oxide · Documentation 4 · Hazard 2 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Instruments, implants, supplies, imaging and monitoring equipment, and diagnostics. These sit mainly in NAICS 3391, with electromedical equipment in 334510 and diagnostic reagents in 325413. In 2022:

• medical equipment and supplies plants shipped $96,834,253,000, with 289,216 employees;
• surgical and medical instrument plants shipped $40,260,371,000;
• electromedical plants shipped $39,564,761,000.

How it runs. Discrete assembly, molding and packaging under validation, often in small, precise cells. One integrator’s needle-bending cell, built on a CompactLogix controller and Kinetix servo drives:

• holds plus or minus 0.002 inch, against a requirement of 0.005;
• makes a needle every nine seconds;
• fits in a 3 by 6 foot footprint.

The rules.

• The QMSR took effect on February 2, 2026, with no phase-in. Part 820 now requires a quality management system that complies with ISO 13485, which the rule incorporates by reference.
• Design controls: apply to Class II and III devices, and to Class I devices “automated with computer software” (820.10).
• UDI: the unique device identifier is recorded for each device or batch and checked before release.
• Inspections: FDA retired its old inspection technique, QSIT, and now inspects under Compliance Program 7382.850.
• Software validation: FDA’s Computer Software Assurance guidance, reissued February 3, 2026, recommends risk-based validation of production and quality software and says testing alone is often insufficient.
• Europe: devices certified under the old directives may stay on the market until the end of 2027 or 2028, depending on class (Regulation 2023/607).
• Canada: a license application must include a certificate showing the quality system meets CAN/CSA-ISO 13485.

What inspections find. FDA’s fiscal 2025 data put four device observations at the top:

• inadequate corrective and preventive action procedures (279);
• inadequate complaint procedures (211);
• inadequate process validation (93);
• labels without a unique device identifier (54).

Sterilization is a policy variable. A July 2025 proclamation states that about 50 percent of sterile devices in the US are sterilized with ethylene oxide, and exempts listed sterilizers from EPA’s 2024 rule for two years. In March 2026, EPA proposed rescinding the rule’s risk-based standards.

When systems go down.

• Stryker identified an incident on March 11, 2026 that disrupted its Microsoft environment. A later filing said it had a “material impact on its operations”.
• Boston Scientific reported in September 2026 that a network outage disrupted manufacturing and order processing.

On the floor. Process validation covers processes whose results cannot be fully checked by later inspection, such as sealing and molding. A change to one of those recipes sends the line back into validation evidence. That is why device lines change slowly, even when the change is small.

Words to know.

• UDI: the unique device identifier that every device label and package must carry.
• QMSR: FDA’s Quality Management System Regulation, which brought ISO 13485 into Part 820.
• Process validation: proving in advance that a process whose results cannot be fully inspected reliably meets its specification.

Traceability is where devices and MES meet. Joltek’s guide to MES traceability for regulated production covers it.

How is automation different in oil, gas, chemicals and power?

Process and energy plants run continuously, often for years between turnarounds, with hazardous materials on site. Control runs in a DCS, safety runs in a separate safety instrumented system under IEC 61511, and electrical design follows hazardous-area rules. Pipelines, power plants and grids add federal control-room and cybersecurity rules, such as PHMSA’s and NERC CIP.

This family sets the pattern for how a plant separates control from safety. Three ideas carry across all five industries below:

• Layers of protection. The control system keeps the process in its normal range, alarms call the operator, and an independent safety instrumented system takes the process to a safe state if both fail. Relief devices and physical design sit behind all three.
• Management of change. A change to logic, setpoints or alarms is a controlled change, with a review of what it does to the hazards.
• The outage window. Large projects wait for a planned turnaround, because the plant does not stop for anything smaller.

Oil and gas

Continuous · PHMSA, TSA, OSHA, EPA, BSEE, Canada Energy Regulator · Documentation 3 · Hazard 4 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 5

What it makes. Crude oil and gas from wells, gas processing, pipelines, refining, LNG and terminals.

• US production: about 13.6 million barrels of crude oil a day in 2025, a record.
• US refining: on January 1, 2026 the country had 130 operable refineries with 18,160,493 barrels a calendar day of distillation capacity. Two refineries closed in 2025.
• Canada: produced 5.35 million barrels a day in 2025.

How it runs.

• Refineries run continuously between turnarounds, typically every three to five years.
• Pipelines run from control rooms, and federal rules reach the people in them. Gas and liquid pipeline operators with a SCADA controller must:
  • keep a written alarm management plan, with a monthly review of points that are inhibited, forced or falsely alarming;
  • follow API RP 1165 whenever a SCADA system is added or replaced;
  • for liquid lines, test any backup SCADA at least once a year.

The control stack. A DCS in plants and refineries. Pipelines and wells run on SCADA with remote terminal units and flow computers, which vendors such as Emerson sell for each oil and gas segment. Open process automation is arriving here first: on April 16, 2026 Yokogawa announced the first product certified to the OPC UA profile of the O-PAS standard.

The rules.

• Process safety: IEC 61511 for safety instrumented systems, edition 2.1, adopted in the US as ANSI/ISA-61511-1-2018. OSHA’s process safety management rule covers listed chemicals and flammables at threshold quantities. It excludes well drilling and normally unoccupied remote facilities.
• Pipeline cybersecurity:
  • API Standard 1164, third edition (2021);
  • TSA’s security directives, reissued as Pipeline-2021-01G and 02G on January 15 and May 1, 2026;
  • a proposed permanent TSA rule from November 2024 that was still not final in October 2026.
• Canada: the Onshore Pipeline Regulations require a pipeline control system that records operating data and alarms, plus a security management program.

On the floor. Federal rules set a pipeline controller’s shift schedule. Operators must give controllers enough off-duty time for eight hours of continuous sleep, and must cap their hours of service.

The lesson that shaped the industry came from a refinery. At Texas City in 2005, a tower overfilled during startup while its level indicator showed the level falling, and 15 people died.

Words to know.

• Turnaround: a planned shutdown of process units for inspection, repair and upgrades.
• Pipeline controller: the person, not the PLC, who monitors and controls a pipeline from the control room.
• SIS: a safety instrumented system that takes a process to a safe state, kept separate from the control system.

Chemicals and petrochemicals

Hybrid · OSHA, EPA, CISA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 5 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes. Petrochemicals, industrial gases, plastics and resins, fertilizers, paints, coatings and adhesives, under NAICS 325.

• US: chemical manufacturing employed 905,500 people in September 2026 (preliminary).
• Canada: the industry shipped C$77,000,000,000 of products in 2024.

How it runs. Two kinds of plant share the name. EPA’s sector profile describes them:

• Commodity plants make large volumes of basic compounds, often continuously, and shut down only a few weeks a year.
• Specialty and batch plants make smaller quantities, with raw materials, processes and equipment that change regularly to meet customer needs. That is ISA-88 territory. IEC published a second edition of ISA-88’s counterpart, IEC 61512-1, in February 2026.

The control stack.

• Large plants run a DCS with a separate safety instrumented system. IEC 61511 asks that the control system be independent enough that the safety system’s integrity is not compromised.
• Smaller specialty plants often run PLC-based batch control.
• The batch manager sits in the control layer in smaller plants and at the MES layer in larger ones.

Vladimir has worked in chemical manufacturing and has seen both arrangements.

The rules.

• Process safety management: OSHA’s process safety management has 14 elements. Management of change, in paragraph (l), requires written procedures for changes to chemicals, technology, equipment and procedures. A change to control logic is a change to technology.
• Risk Management Program: EPA’s rule, last revised in 2024, has a February 2026 proposal pending that would revise it again.
• Chemical security: the federal Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards lapsed on July 28, 2023. CISA offers a voluntary program instead.
• Canada and the EU: Canada’s counterpart to process safety management is CSA Z767, second edition 2024. The EU’s Seveso III Directive covers more than 11,000 installations.

Modular and open automation. Process modules can now describe themselves to the control system:

• PI, NAMUR and ZVEI released Module Type Package Specification 2.0 in January 2026.
• NAMUR’s Open Architecture adds a second channel that sends plant data to monitoring and optimization without touching the control system.

What investigations found. The Chemical Safety Board’s recent reports keep returning to controls:

• Arkema, Crosby, Texas (2017): flooding disabled refrigeration and organic peroxides burned. The loss of a utility started it.
• Shell Polymers, Monaca, Pennsylvania (2025): after a cracking furnace explosion, the board recommended engineered controls where only administrative ones existed.
• Dow, Plaquemine, Louisiana (2023): after multiple explosions, the board recommended monitoring process lines that should be inerted.

Words to know.

• ISA-88: the batch control standard, which organizes a plant into units and a recipe into procedures, operations and phases.
• Management of change: the written procedure for reviewing a change before it is made.
• Module Type Package: a vendor-neutral description of a process module’s interfaces, so it can plug into a higher-level control system.

Code changes in a plant like this need the same discipline as any other change. Joltek’s guide to managing changes to controller code covers the tools.

Go deeper: the chemical plant automation guide, which covers DCS or PLC, the safety system, the rules auditors check and migrating inside a turnaround window.

Power generation

Continuous · FERC, NERC, EPA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 3 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 5

What it makes. Electricity from gas, coal and hydro (renewables follow below).

Measure	Value
US nameplate capacity, end of 2025	1,376,742 megawatts
Natural gas share of that capacity	578,379 megawatts
US generation, 2025	About 4.43 trillion kilowatthours
Gas share of generation	About 41 percent
Canada’s electricity from hydro, 2024	55.2 percent

How it runs. Continuously, against a load that keeps rising. PJM, ERCOT and the Southwest Power Pool each set peak load records in summer 2026.

The control stack. Plant control is DCS-based. Emerson calls its Ovation system “purposely designed for the power generation and water/wastewater industries”.

The turbine usually brings its own controls. GE Vernova calls its Mark VIe control “developed by the same people who built your turbine”. ISA’s ISA-77 series covers fossil plant controls: boiler combustion, feedwater, steam turbines and emissions control.

The rules. NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection standards, approved by FERC, are where most new work comes from:

• Internal network security monitoring: CIP-015-1 was approved in Order No. 907. It becomes effective on October 1, 2028 for control centers, with other medium impact systems following by October 1, 2030. CIP-015-2, which extends the monitoring, was adopted by NERC in June 2026 and approved by FERC in August 2026.
• Low impact and virtualization: in March 2026 FERC approved CIP-003-11 for low impact facilities and new standards that allow virtualization.

On the floor. The 2003 Northeast blackout reached an estimated 50 million people. Part of the story is a control room failure: FirstEnergy’s alarm and logging system failed shortly after 14:14 EDT and was not restored until after the blackout. Operators lost their alarms just when they needed them.

Words to know.

• INSM: internal network security monitoring, watching traffic inside a trusted zone.
• Impact rating: the high, medium or low category NERC CIP assigns to each cyber system.
• IEC 61850: the international series for communication in power utility automation.

Nuclear

Continuous · NRC, CNSC · Documentation 5 · Hazard 5 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 5

The United States had 94 operating commercial reactors at 54 plants in 28 states as of March 2026. Much of the fleet still relies on analog safety controls.

On January 5, 2026 the NRC approved what it called the first major digital retrofit at an operating plant: Limerick Units 1 and 2 will replace several analog safety systems with one digital plant protection system.

• The review turned on one question: whether a key component could suffer a common cause failure from a latent design defect.
• The project: Westinghouse supplies the platform. Installation is planned across two refueling outages, in spring 2027 and spring 2028. The project is estimated at $167,000,000, with several thousand procedures to revise.

The rules.

• Quality assurance: 10 CFR 50 Appendix B sets 18 criteria.
• Protection systems: applications filed since 1999 must meet IEEE 603-1991.
• Cyber protection: 10 CFR 73.54 requires high assurance that digital systems are protected against cyberattack.
• International I&C standard: IEC 61513 reached its third edition in June 2026.
• Canada: the CNSC’s REGDOC-2.5.2 covers reactor I&C and cyber security.

Words to know.

• Plant protection system: the safety system that trips the reactor.
• Common cause failure: one flaw that disables redundant safety equipment at once.
• Appendix B: the NRC’s quality assurance criteria.

Renewables, hydrogen and energy storage

Distributed · FERC, NERC, OSHA, IRS and Treasury · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Solar, wind, battery storage and hydrogen. In 2025 the United States added 57,729 megawatts of utility-scale capacity:

• solar: 29,645 megawatts;
• other sources, including batteries: 16,448 megawatts;
• wind: 6,272 megawatts.

US battery storage reached 43.6 gigawatts at the end of 2025, after a record 15 gigawatts added that year.

The control stack. Equipment makers supply much of the control, under a plant controller and SCADA. GE Vernova engineers its Mark VIe for wind turbines, and Siemens Energy’s Omnivise T3000 now covers renewables and battery storage. Grid rules decide much of the logic:

• IEEE 1547-2018 for distributed resources;
• IEEE 2800-2022 for inverter-based resources on transmission;
• NERC’s PRC-029-1 ride-through requirements, approved in 2025.

The rules.

• Battery fire safety: NFPA 855 is in its 2026 edition. UL 9540A, the battery fire propagation test, reached its sixth edition on March 13, 2026, effective January 1, 2027. UL 9540 for the system itself is in its third edition.
• Tax credit deadlines:
  • Public Law 119-21 moved the construction deadline for the 45V hydrogen credit to January 1, 2028.
  • Wind and solar credits end for plants placed in service after 2027 unless construction began by July 4, 2026.
• Hydrogen: the United States makes about 10 million metric tons a year, mostly for refining and ammonia. OSHA’s 1910.103 covers hydrogen systems.

Words to know.

• Inverter-based resource: a solar, wind or battery plant connected through power electronics.
• Ride-through: staying connected through a voltage or frequency disturbance.
• 45V: the US clean hydrogen production credit.

Go deeper: whether hydrogen is a control-system project, from the chemical plant guide.

How is automation different in mining, metals and other heavy materials?

Heavy materials plants run around the clock in heat, dust and vibration, on equipment that can be decades old. Furnaces, kilns, mills and recovery boilers carry their own safety codes, and the equipment builder often owns the process models above the PLC. Mines add an autonomous haul fleet that the truck maker, not the mine, controls.

These are energy-hungry plants. In the 2022 Economic Census, purchased fuels and electricity cost 15.5 percent of shipments at cement plants and 7.9 percent at pulp, paper and paperboard mills. The figure for all manufacturing was 1.5 percent. At primary aluminum plants, electricity alone was 19.7 percent. Energy is a controls problem here, not just a utility bill.

Practitioners describe the culture in similar terms across the family. One calls metals “a very conservative industry”, with old machines next to new technology. Another calls pulp and paper the loosest of the industries, with forced I/O and bypassed interlocks.

Mining and minerals

Hybrid · MSHA, EPA, provincial regulators in Canada · Documentation 2 · Hazard 4 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes. Coal, metal ores and industrial minerals, under NAICS 212. The US Geological Survey puts the value of US nonfuel mineral production at $112,000,000,000 in 2025. Copper alone came from 26 mines, two primary smelters and 14 electrowon refineries.

How it runs. One site holds two automation domains.

• The concentrator runs like a process plant: crushing, grinding, flotation and tailings, on a DCS or PLCs. Rockwell positions its PlantPAx system as the core system for mineral processing.
• The mobile fleet belongs to the equipment makers:
  • Komatsu reports more than 900 trucks commissioned on its autonomous haulage system;
  • Caterpillar says its autonomous trucks have hauled more than 13 billion tonnes.

On the floor. The control room can be a continent away. At Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri iron ore mine, 23 autonomous haul trucks and three autonomous drills are monitored from Perth, 1,500 kilometers away.

The rules.

• Safety standards sit in 30 CFR Parts 56, 57, 75 and 77, by mine type.
• Machine safety for autonomy: ISO 17757:2019 covers autonomous machine system safety and was confirmed in 2024.
• Silica: MSHA’s 2024 respirable silica rule is stayed. The existing limits still apply.

Words to know.

• Autonomous haulage system: the software and onboard controls that drive haul trucks without a driver.
• Comminution: crushing and grinding rock so the mineral can be separated.
• Tailings: the waste slurry left over, pumped to a storage facility that must be monitored.

Metals

Hybrid · EPA, OSHA, state air agencies · Documentation 2 · Hazard 4 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes. Steel, aluminum and castings.

• Steel output: the US made 82 million tons of raw steel in 2025, worth about $149,000,000,000.
• Two routes:
  • integrated mills, at eight active locations, make about 28 percent of it;
  • 102 electric arc furnace minimills make the rest.
• Continuous casting produced an estimated 99.7 percent of US raw steel in 2025.

The control stack. Above the PLCs and drives sits Level 2, the process computer that runs metallurgical models to set up each furnace, caster and mill. It usually comes from the mill builder:

• Primetals sells Level 2 “Optimizer” systems.
• Danieli Automation supplies caster process control.
• SMS group is replacing the Level 2 system on a hot strip mill it built in 1993.

The rules.

• Furnace safety: NFPA 86 is now in its 2027 edition. ISO 13577-2 covers furnace combustion safety and is under revision.
• Coke ovens: a 2025 proclamation exempted listed coke oven facilities from parts of EPA’s 2024 air toxics rule for two years.

What investigations found. On August 11, 2025, an explosion at the coke oven batteries of U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant killed two workers. The Chemical Safety Board’s final report made seven recommendations, citing the standard for cleaning and purging flammable gas piping.

Words to know.

• Heat: one batch of steel, tracked by number from furnace to caster.
• Level 2: the model-driven process computer above the PLCs.
• Continuous caster: the machine that turns liquid steel into a solid strand without stopping between heats.

Replacing a mill’s controls without a long outage is its own discipline. Joltek’s guide to migrating a control platform without a long outage covers the method.

Pulp, paper and tissue

Continuous · EPA, OSHA, state agencies, Environment and Climate Change Canada · Documentation 2 · Hazard 4 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes. Pulp, paper and paperboard, in 356 US mills that shipped $82,523,903,000 in 2022.

How it runs. Kraft pulping cooks wood chips in white liquor, then burns the spent liquor in a recovery boiler to reclaim the chemicals and make steam. EPA says kraft is over 80 percent of US chemical pulp. The paper machine then runs as a continuous web, controlled by a quality control system (QCS):

• scanners measure weight, moisture and thickness across the sheet;
• actuators correct the profile.

Valmet’s basis weight sensor uses a krypton-85 beta source.

The control stack. A DCS for pulping and recovery, the vendor’s QCS on the machine, and PLCs in finishing and converting. Valmet sells its own DNA control system alongside its machines.

On the floor. The recovery boiler sets the safety culture. Water meeting molten smelt can cause a vapor explosion, so the emergency shutdown stops all fuel and drains the boiler. Industry audit guidelines tell mills to audit the DCS, the safety systems and the PLCs, and to test the interlocks.

In January 2026 a hydrogen sulfide release at the Woodland Pulp mill in Maine killed two people. The Chemical Safety Board is investigating.

Words to know.

• Recovery boiler: burns spent cooking liquor to recover chemicals and make steam.
• QCS: the quality control system that scans and corrects the sheet.
• Black liquor: the spent cooking liquor, concentrated and burned in the recovery boiler.

Cement, lime, aggregates and ceramics

Continuous · EPA, MSHA, OSHA, Environment and Climate Change Canada · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes, in 2025 (USGS):

• Cement: 97 US plants in 34 states and Puerto Rico shipped about 100 million tons.
• Aggregates: 3,500 quarries produced about 1.5 billion tons of crushed stone.

How it runs. A cement kiln heats a raw mix until it forms clinker. About one third of the limestone’s mass leaves as carbon dioxide, which is why cement plants sit next to their quarries. Kiln dynamics are slow and the kiln runs continuously. Control centers on holding the kiln steady, with a continuous emissions monitoring system recording the stack.

The rules.

• Air toxics: EPA’s rule for Portland cement plants is 40 CFR 63 Subpart LLL. Its last amendment was in 2021.
• Kilns that burn hazardous waste: EPA’s June 2026 rule sets a hydrogen cyanide limit and relies on automatic waste feed cutoff interlocks. That is a controls requirement written into air law.
• Mine safety: quarries and the mills attached to them are mines under the Mine Safety and Health Act, so MSHA’s standards apply.

Words to know.

• Clinker: the nodules a kiln makes, later ground with gypsum into cement.
• Calcination: heating limestone until it releases carbon dioxide.
• CEMS: the continuous emissions monitoring system on the stack.

Glass

Continuous · EPA, OSHA, state air agencies · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 5

What it makes. Flat glass, containers and glassware. In 2022, 1,607 US establishments shipped $31,886,463,000. Glass containers came from only 22 firms.

How it runs.

• The furnace melts sand, soda ash, limestone and cullet continuously. It is rebuilt only about once every 10 to 15 years and cannot be stopped mid-campaign. Major control and combustion changes therefore wait for the rebuild.
• Forming: downstream, container machines cut molten glass into gobs and press or blow them into bottles. The hot-end controls come from the machine builders.

The rules. Glass melting furnaces fall under federal performance standards (40 CFR 60 Subpart CC) and an area-source air toxics rule. OSHA’s silica standard sets an exposure limit of 50 micrograms per cubic meter.

Words to know.

• Campaign: a furnace’s life between rebuilds.
• Gob: the cut piece of molten glass that becomes a container.
• Cullet: recycled broken glass fed back into the furnace.

Plastics and rubber

Hybrid · OSHA, EPA, FDA for medical and food-contact parts · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Molded and extruded parts, film, pipe, foam, bottles, hoses and belts. In 2022, 11,630 US establishments shipped $303,212,658,000. Tires are covered with automotive.

The control stack. Machine builders make their own controllers:

• ARBURG builds its machines and controllers in Lossburg, Germany;
• Beckhoff calls EtherCAT “the standard for the injection molding machine industry”.

A plant connects to these machines rather than reprogramming them. It does so through the EUROMAP OPC UA specifications: EUROMAP 77 for exchange with MES, and EUROMAP 83 for the common types.

The rules.

• Molding machine safety: ISO 20430:2020, confirmed in 2025.
• US standard: ANSI/PLASTICS B151.1 is being revised to align with it, with a draft in public review in October 2026.

On the floor. Dust is a hazard here too. In 2003, fine plastic powder that had built up above a suspended ceiling at a West Pharmaceutical Services plant in Kinston, North Carolina ignited and killed six people.

Words to know.

• EUROMAP 77: the OPC UA interface between a molding machine and MES.
• Clamp force: the force holding the mold shut, which sets the machine’s size class.
• Take-out robot: the robot that removes parts from the open mold.

Wood products

Hybrid · OSHA, EPA, provincial regulators in Canada · Documentation 1 · Hazard 3 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 2

Sawmills, plywood, engineered wood and pallets. In 2022 there were 2,800 US sawmills, which shipped $41,310,536,000.

The control stack. The saw line is an optimization problem. Scanners measure each log and board, and optimizer software picks the cutting pattern. MiCROTEC says it is the only company offering scanning and optimization from log to final product. PLCs and guarding sit underneath.

The rules.

• OSHA’s sawmill standard, 29 CFR 1910.265, still points to a 1962 dust explosion code and a 1957 conveyor standard.
• NFPA has folded its wood dust standard into NFPA 660 (2025). NFPA 664’s 2020 edition was the last stand-alone one.
• The hazard is real: the Chemical Safety Board’s dust study found that wood alone accounted for over 20 percent of the dust explosions it studied.

Words to know.

• Optimizer: the software that picks each log’s cutting pattern from scanner data.
• Combustible dust: fine dust that can explode when airborne in a confined space.
• Dry kiln: the oven that dries green lumber to a target moisture.

How is automation different in automotive, electronics, aerospace and other discrete plants?

Discrete plants build countable units such as cars, chips, aircraft and machines. Control is PLCs, robots and motion, paced in seconds per station, and traceability runs by serial number or vehicle identification number. Customers often write the rules: automakers publish their own controls standards, aerospace primes require AS9100 and Nadcap, and defense work brings cybersecurity and export controls.

Industrial robots are concentrated here. Of the 38,400 industrial robots the United States installed in 2025, 13,526 went to automotive, about 35 percent. Worldwide, electronics took the most robots, 24 percent, ahead of automotive at 23 percent.

The same family also contains some of the least automated plants in the country. In the 2022 Economic Census robotics tables, 1.1 percent of apparel plants had robots, against 6.4 percent of all manufacturing plants.

Automotive and tire

Discrete · NHTSA, OSHA, EPA, Transport Canada · Documentation 3 · Hazard 3 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 4

What it makes. Vehicles, bodies, trailers and parts (NAICS 3361 to 3363), plus tires (326211). In 2022, US automotive plants had 1,004,374 employees and shipped $740,784,023,000. US assembly ran at an annual rate of 10.21 million vehicles in September 2026.

How it runs. Press shop, body shop, paint shop and final assembly, paced by the line:

• Body shop: heavily robotic. Volkswagen’s Zwickau electric-car plant targets 89 percent automation in the body shop, against 28 percent in final assembly.
• Paint shop: a process inside a discrete plant, with spray booths and cure ovens under NFPA 33 and NFPA 86.
• Tire plants: mix rubber in Banbury mixers, build an uncured “green” tire, then cure it at more than 300 degrees F for 12 to 15 minutes for passenger tires.

The control stack. Station PLCs, safety PLCs, robot controllers and weld controllers, programmed by the line builder to the automaker’s standard. The previous section covers the standards at Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen.

The paint shop has its own dominant builder. Dürr states a global market share of 50 to 60 percent in paint shop construction and application technology.

The rules.

• Quality: IATF 16949:2016, with a second edition planned for mid-2027.
• Robot safety: the 2025 editions of ISO 10218 parts 1 and 2, and ANSI/A3 R15.06-2025.
• Tires: FMVSS 139 sets performance requirements. A 13-symbol tire identification number carries the plant code and the week and year of manufacture.

When systems go down. A September 2025 cyberattack shut down Jaguar Land Rover’s production. The UK government then backed a loan guarantee of up to £1,500,000,000, citing 34,000 direct jobs and about 120,000 in the supply chain.

Words to know.

• Body-in-white: the welded vehicle body before paint and trim.
• PPAP: the production part approval process, the evidence package that a process makes good parts.
• Andon: the board or light that shows a problem on the line.

For the code itself, see Joltek’s page on change control on automotive lines.

Electronics and semiconductors

Discrete · OSHA, EPA, BIS export controls, the CHIPS Program Office · Documentation 3 · Hazard 3 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 5

What it makes. Wafers, chips, circuit boards and assemblies (NAICS 334). In 2022, US semiconductor plants had 106,969 employees and shipped $62,435,106,000.

How it runs. A wafer passes through 400 to 1,400 process steps, taking about 12 weeks on average and 14 to 20 weeks for advanced processes. Automated vehicles and overhead hoists move the wafer carriers between tools.

The control stack. Here the ownership lens matters most. The tool maker writes and owns the equipment controller software, including its interface to the fab’s host system. The fab integrates tools; it does not reprogram them. Three SEMI standards define the seams:

• SEMI E30 (GEM, current revision E30-0526) defines how equipment behaves through its communications link;
• SEMI E84 defines the handshake for handing wafer carriers between vehicles and tools;
• SEMI E187 covers cybersecurity of fab equipment.

Circuit board assembly has its own data standard, IPC-2591 CFX, whose version 2.0 came out in April 2025.

The rules.

• Cleanrooms: classified under ISO 14644-1:2015, now under systematic review. Fab fire protection follows NFPA 318 (2025).
• Policy: the CHIPS and Science Act provided $39,000,000,000 for manufacturing incentives. The investment credit rose to 35 percent for property placed in service after 2025. A 25 percent duty on specified semiconductors and fab equipment took effect on January 15, 2026.

Words to know.

• SECS/GEM: the message standards and equipment model that let a fab host command a tool.
• FOUP: the sealed carrier for 300 millimeter wafers.
• AMHS: the automated material handling system that moves the carriers.

Batteries and the EV supply chain

Hybrid · OSHA, EPA, IRS, NHTSA, European Commission · Documentation 3 · Hazard 4 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Cells, modules and packs, all in one NAICS code, 335910. In 2022, 294 US plants shipped $28,203,966,000.

How it runs. A battery plant is hybrid:

• Electrode mixing and coating is a process, run in dry rooms where the accepted dew point is minus 40 degrees C, below 1 percent relative humidity.
• Cell assembly is discrete.
• Formation and aging set the pace. Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers report that wetting and formation can take 3 to 7 days and aging up to two more weeks, using up to 25 percent of the plant’s floor space.

The control stack. Machine builders deliver coating, stacking and formation lines with their own controls. Beckhoff, for example, sells control for Z-fold stacking with up to 255 synchronized axes.

The rules and the market.

• Fire testing: UL 9540A is in its sixth edition (2026), and UL 9540 in its third.
• EU battery passport: from February 18, 2027, every EV battery and every industrial battery above 2 kWh sold in the EU needs an electronic battery passport.
• US credits: the federal clean vehicle credit ended for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025. The 45X production credit remains, at $35 per kilowatt-hour for cells.
• Plant plans: in December 2025 Ford reorganized its battery plants and announced an energy storage business.

Words to know.

• Formation: a new cell’s first controlled charge and discharge.
• Dry room: a room held at a very low dew point.
• NMP: the solvent used to coat cathodes and recovered from dryer exhaust.

Aerospace

Discrete · FAA, DoD, OSHA, State Department · Documentation 4 · Hazard 3 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 2

What it makes. Aircraft, engines and parts (NAICS 3364). In 2022, 1,865 US plants had 416,552 employees and shipped $203,522,434,000.

How it runs. Low rate, high mix, every part traced:

• Final assembly: Boeing’s 737 line at Renton runs through 10 factory positions called “flow days”.
• Rate: Boeing’s 2025 annual report says it plans to raise the 737 to 47 a month in 2026, and only with FAA concurrence.

The control stack. CNC machines and special-purpose cells for automated drilling, riveting and fiber placement. Above them sits the record. Boeing tracks work instructions, nonconformances and rework in a manufacturing execution system it calls CMES.

The rules.

• Quality: AS9100D (2016) is still the current edition. The industry is revising it as IA9100, and no published revision was found in October 2026.
• First article inspection: AS9102C (2023) governs it.
• Critical processes: Nadcap accredits processes such as heat treating and welding at more than 4,500 suppliers.
• FAA production approval holders must keep quality records for at least five years, and ten for critical components.

On the floor. The record can be the failure. The NTSB found that the January 2024 door plug loss on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 traced to a missing removal record. When the plug was opened at Renton, no record was generated, so it was closed without its securing bolts and no inspection followed.

Words to know.

• First article inspection: the documented full check of the first part from a new process.
• Nadcap: accreditation of critical processes.
• Nonconformance report: the record of a part that missed requirements.

Defense and munitions

Discrete · DoD, State Department, OSHA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 4 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 3

What it makes. Ammunition, ordnance, armored vehicles and missiles. In 2022, 743 US ammunition and ordnance plants shipped $20,554,958,000.

How it runs. At a production surge:

• The target: the Army’s stated goal is 100,000 155 mm artillery rounds a month. In February 2024 it was making 30,000.
• New capacity: a projectile-loading facility in Camden, Arkansas opened in April 2025, built to make 50,000 completed projectiles a month.

The rules.

• CMMC:
  • Phase 1 has been in force since November 10, 2025.
  • Phase 2 was due November 10, 2026, but the Department of War suspended it on July 13, 2026 pending a review. No new date had been announced by early October 2026.
  • What still applies: contractors must still meet DFARS 252.204-7012, including 72-hour incident reporting, and the NIST SP 800-171 controls.
• Where OT stands: the CMMC scoping rule treats operational technology as “Specialized Assets”. They must be inventoried, documented and shown on the network diagram, but are not assessed against the other requirements at Level 2.
• ITAR: releasing technical data to a foreign person, even inside the United States, is a deemed export. That limits who can support a plant’s systems remotely.

Words to know.

• CUI: controlled unclassified information.
• ITAR: the US rules controlling defense articles and technical data.
• C3PAO: an accredited CMMC third-party assessor.

Shipbuilding and rail

Discrete · US Coast Guard, Federal Railroad Administration, class societies · Documentation 3 · Hazard 2 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 2

Low-volume, long-cycle builds:

• Ships: in 2022, ship and boat building employed 148,040 people in the United States. Huntington Ingalls, which builds carriers and submarines, reports about 44,000 employees.
• Locomotives: Wabtec reported 2025 revenue of $11,167,000,000 and names Progress Rail as its main locomotive competitor.

Ships are built to rules written by private class societies. The twelve members of IACS say their rules cover more than 90 percent of world cargo-carrying tonnage. Rail software in Europe now follows EN 50716:2023.

Words to know.

• Class society: the private body whose rules ships are built and surveyed to.
• Block construction: building a ship in pre-outfitted sections.
• SIL: safety integrity level, the 0 to 4 rating of a safety function.

Machinery and machine builders

Discrete · OSHA, European Commission, EU market surveillance authorities · Documentation 3 · Hazard 2 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 2

What it makes. The machines every other industry buys (NAICS 333). In 2022, 21,476 US plants had 1,069,526 employees and shipped $445,515,810,000.

The rules. The EU Machinery Regulation, which applies from January 20, 2027, reaches into software for the first time:

• Software protection: machinery must identify the software needed for safe operation, protect it from corruption, and collect evidence of modifications.
• Source code: a manufacturer must make source code or programming logic available to authorities on a reasoned request.
• Substantial modification: anyone who substantially modifies a machine “by physical or digital means” becomes its manufacturer. That can include an end user changing its software.

North American builders work to NFPA 79 (2024) and UL 508A, and to the safety standards ISO 13849-1:2023 and IEC 62061:2021. OSHA’s fiscal 2025 data put lockout/tagout fourth and machine guarding tenth among its most cited standards.

On the floor. Who owns the code is settled in the purchase contract, or not at all. The Machinery Regulation now makes software changes a legal question too.

Words to know.

• FAT and SAT: the customer-witnessed factory and site acceptance tests.
• CE marking: the manufacturer’s mark that a machine meets EU requirements.
• Substantial modification: a change after sale that creates a new hazard and makes the modifier responsible.

Joltek’s guide to bringing new machinery into a plant covers the handover side.

Fabricated metal and machining

Discrete · OSHA, EPA, Commerce · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 2

What it makes. The largest manufacturing subsector by plant count: 54,131 US establishments in 2022, with 1,424,399 employees. Most shops are tiny. In 2023, 83.3 percent of machine shops had fewer than 20 employees.

The control stack. Closed CNC controls, few PLCs, and data collected through MTConnect or OPC UA. Machine monitoring vendors connect to most major CNC brands, and cobots tend machines.

The rules. Since April 6, 2026, Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and copper articles apply to the full customs value of the product, whatever its metal content.

Words to know.

• Machine tending: a robot loading and unloading a CNC machine.
• G-code: the program a CNC machine runs.
• Press brake: the machine that bends sheet metal.

Appliances and furniture

Discrete · CPSC, DOE, EPA, OSHA · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 2

Few, large appliance plants and many small furniture shops:

• Appliances: 304 plants in 2022. Whirlpool says about 80 percent of the major appliances it sells in the US are made in the US.
• Furniture: 14,399 plants. Only 3.8 percent had robots in 2022.
• Rules and tariffs: product rules come from the Department of Energy for efficiency and the CPSC for safety. A 25 percent duty on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets took effect on October 14, 2025.

Words to know.

• Nesting: cutting many parts from one board on a CNC router.
• Edge banding: gluing a strip to a panel’s cut edge.
• Casegoods: cabinet-type furniture.

Textiles, apparel and leather

Discrete · CPSC, FTC, OSHA, EPA · Documentation 1 · Hazard 2 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 2

Size: in 2022, 12,400 US plants with 273,320 employees. In 2023, 85.2 percent of apparel plants had fewer than 20 employees.

How it runs: mills automate spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing. Apparel plants are small, and only 1.1 percent had robots in 2022.

The software problem: one manufacturing engineer noted that garment planning has challenged traditional ERP and MES “due to the size ranges and Bom complexity.”

Words to know.

• Bill of materials: the component list, which multiplies across sizes and colors.
• Greige goods: fabric straight off the loom.
• Cut-and-sew: cutting and stitching garments.

Printing

Discrete · EPA, OSHA · Documentation 1 · Hazard 2 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 2

Size: in 2022, 22,844 US printing plants. In 2023, more than half had fewer than five employees.

How it runs: press makers supply the controls, and Rockwell sells retrofits for “outdated or obsolete controls”.

The job data standard: CIP4 maintains the Job Definition Format, which carries job instructions between prepress, press and finishing.

Words to know.

• Register: how precisely each color prints on the others.
• JDF: the Job Definition Format.
• Web press: a press that prints on a continuous roll.

How is automation different in water, wastewater and the grid?

Utilities run distributed systems across hundreds or thousands of unattended sites, owned by public bodies or regulated companies. Water systems use PLCs and SCADA over radio and cellular links, and grids use protection relays, remote terminal units and control centers under NERC CIP. Budgets and staff are thin, and an outage reaches the public directly.

Two things set utilities apart from manufacturing. Their assets are spread across many unattended sites. And their owners answer to the public, so budgets move through rate cases and councils rather than capital committees.

Water and wastewater

Continuous · EPA, state primacy agencies, CISA, OSHA, Environment and Climate Change Canada · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 5

What it runs. Drinking water and wastewater systems:

• Drinking water: the United States has over 148,000 public water systems.
• Wastewater: EPA’s 2022 survey counts 17,544 publicly owned treatment works serving 270.4 million people.
• Investment need: the drinking water systems’ 20-year capital need is $625,000,000,000.

The control stack. PLCs and SCADA, with remote sites on telemetry links. At larger plants a DCS appears; Emerson says its Ovation system is designed for power and water. Small PLC and HMI units are common: CISA notes that the Unitronics devices targeted in 2023 are widely used in the sector.

The rules.

• Risk assessments: under section 2013 of America’s Water Infrastructure Act, every community water system serving more than 3,300 people must assess its risks, including its “electronic, computer, or other automated systems”, and review the assessment every five years.
• PFAS: EPA set limits for PFOA and PFOS of 4.0 nanograms per liter in 2024. A May 2026 proposal would move the compliance date from April 26, 2029 to April 26, 2031 for systems that request it. It was still a proposal in October 2026, and the 2024 rule remains in litigation.
• Lead: the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements lower the lead action level to 0.010 milligrams per liter, with core compliance from November 1, 2027. EPA’s November 2025 update estimates 4,000,000 lead service lines nationwide.

When systems are attacked.

• 2021: an intruder used a US water plant’s SCADA to raise sodium hydroxide dosing. CISA’s advice afterward includes physical safeguards, such as sizing chemical pumps and reservoirs, so that a compromised controller cannot reach a dangerous dose.
• Late 2023: actors calling themselves CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 internet-facing Unitronics devices, at least 34 of them at US water utilities, many with default passwords.
• October 2024: American Water, a large regulated utility, reported unauthorized network activity. It believed none of its water or wastewater facilities had been affected.

The workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts about 131,000 water and wastewater operators and projects a 6 percent decline by 2035, with about 10,000 openings a year from retirements and departures. One integrator observes that municipal plants promote operators into controls roles because it is cheaper than hiring from outside.

Words to know.

• Lift station: a remote pump station that lifts wastewater uphill.
• Disinfectant residual: the chlorine left in treated water as it travels through pipes.
• MCL: the maximum contaminant level, the enforceable drinking water limit.

Two Joltek pages apply directly:

• change tracking for utility control systems;
• controlling remote access for vendors and integrators, the most common way into a remote site.

Electric utilities and the grid

Distributed · FERC, NERC, state utility commissions, CISA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 3 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 5

What it runs. Transmission, distribution and control centers, serving 165,488,106 US customers in 2025.

The control stack.

• In substations: protection relays and RTUs.
• In control centers: SCADA, energy management systems and, on the distribution side, an advanced distribution management system (ADMS). That one platform combines distribution management, SCADA, outage management and distributed energy resource management.
• Protection relays: Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories says its founder invented the first microprocessor-based protective relay in 1982. It is now 100 percent employee-owned, with more than 9,000 employees.

The rules.

• Cyber systems: NERC CIP-002 sorts each system as high, medium or low impact. The other CIP standards follow from that rating, including the internal monitoring rule (CIP-015) and the 2026 low impact controls (CIP-003-11).
• Protocols: IEC 61850 governs substation communication. DNP3’s IEEE standard is listed as inactive-reserved, though the protocol remains in wide use.

What went wrong.

• 2003: in the Northeast blackout, a control room lost its alarms at the moment it needed them.
• 2015: attackers remotely opened breakers at three Ukrainian distribution companies, cutting power to about 225,000 customers.
• April 28, 2025: Spain and Portugal blacked out. The expert panel’s final report found multiple interacting factors, including voltage oscillations and generation disconnections. Restoration took 12 hours in Portugal and 16 in Spain.

Words to know.

• IED: an intelligent electronic device, such as a protective relay.
• BES Cyber System: a system NERC CIP covers because its loss could harm the bulk electric system.
• ADMS: the advanced distribution management system.

Waste, recycling and waste-to-energy

Hybrid · EPA, state agencies, OSHA · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 3

What it handles. Americans generated 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, the latest year on EPA’s overview.

How it runs. Two very different plant types:

• Waste-to-energy plants are continuous combustion processes with continuous emissions monitoring. EPA lists 75 of them.
• Recycling plants are conveyor and sensor systems. Optical sorters with near-infrared and visible-light sensors fire air jets at moving items, and robotic sorters are spreading.

On the floor. Batteries start fires. EPA identified 245 lithium-ion battery fires at 64 waste facilities from 2013 to 2020.

Words to know.

• MRF: a materials recovery facility.
• Waste-to-energy: a plant that burns waste to make steam and power.
• Optical sorter: a machine that identifies items by sensor and ejects them with air jets.

How is automation different in data centers, warehouses, buildings and infrastructure?

Data centers, warehouses and buildings automate a facility or a flow of goods rather than a recipe. Data centers run separate building, power and infrastructure management systems toward uptime tiers. Warehouses run conveyors and sorters under warehouse control software. Commercial buildings run BACnet controls installed by a vendor’s branch. The stakes are uptime and throughput.

This family uses the same controllers as factories and a different vocabulary. Engineers who move here from manufacturing meet unfamiliar terms. A data center talks about tiers and concurrent maintainability. A warehouse talks about its warehouse management and control systems (WMS and WCS). A building talks about sequences of operation.

Data centers

Facility · Local authorities having jurisdiction, state utility commissions and grid operators, European Commission · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 2 · Uptime pressure 5

What it runs. The buildings, power and cooling under the IT load. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that US data centers used 176 TWh in 2023, 4.4 percent of US electricity. It projects 325 to 580 TWh by 2028.

The control stack.

• Facility systems: a building management system for cooling, an electrical power monitoring system for switchgear, generators and UPS, and DCIM software above both.
• Equipment controllers: chillers, coolant distribution units, UPS and generator paralleling controls arrive with their own controllers.
• PLCs on chillers: many large operators run mission-critical cooling on PLCs, including 10 to 18 megawatt chillers, one practitioner reports.

The standards.

• Uptime Institute Tiers: the Tier standard runs from Tier I, basic capacity, to Tier IV, fault tolerant. It states no availability percentages.
• TIA-942-C: the current edition of the telecommunications infrastructure standard for data centers, announced in May 2024.
• ASHRAE’s thermal guidelines: recommend 18 to 27 degrees C at the server inlet and define the liquid cooling classes.

What is changing. AI hardware is moving rack power far beyond the average:

• The average rack: Uptime’s 2025 survey puts typical rack density at almost 9 kilowatts.
• AI racks: NVIDIA documents about 120 kilowatts for a DGX GB200 rack and up to 142 kilowatts for a GB300 NVL72, both liquid cooled. NVIDIA plans to move to 800 VDC power for 1 megawatt racks from 2027.
• The grid: PJM’s July 2026 capacity auction cleared at its price cap and finished 6,831 megawatts short of its reliability requirement.

On the floor. Most outages are preventable. In Uptime’s 2025 survey:

• power caused 45 percent of the most recent impactful outages;
• 87 percent of operators who had one said better management, processes or configuration would have avoided it.

In November 2025, a cooling failure at a data center in Aurora, Illinois halted CME Group’s markets for more than 10 hours. The operator said staff and contractors had not followed procedures for draining cooling towers before freezing weather.

Words to know.

• PUE: power usage effectiveness, total facility power divided by IT power.
• 2N: two complete, independent power systems, each able to carry the full load.
• EPMS: the electrical power monitoring system.

Warehousing and logistics

Discrete · OSHA, FDA for food traceability, state labor agencies · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 4 · Uptime pressure 4

What it runs. Conveyors, sorters, automated storage and robots that move orders. Warehousing and storage employs 1,831,800 people (September 2026, preliminary). E-commerce was 17.1 percent of US retail sales in the second quarter of 2026.

How it runs. Throughput is the product. FedEx’s Memphis hub can process 484,000 packages an hour. Its newest sorting building, with 11 miles of conveyor, handles 56,000 an hour.

The control stack. Two software layers sit above the PLCs:

• The warehouse management system (WMS) handles orders and inventory.
• The warehouse control system (WCS) routes cartons and coordinates conveyors and sorters in real time.

PLCs run the conveyors, sorters and diverts underneath. Vladimir has worked in warehousing.

The rules.

• Conveyors: the US conveyor safety standard is ASME B20.1-2024. ANSI MH10, often cited for conveyors, actually covers unit-load labeling.
• Mobile robots: driverless trucks and mobile robots follow ISO 3691-4 (2023).
• Forklifts: 29 CFR 1910.178 requires operator evaluations every three years.

Who supplies it. Vendor viability is a real risk:

• Honeywell announced in April 2026 that it would sell its warehouse automation business, which includes Intelligrated, to American Industrial Partners.
• Symbotic depends on one customer: Walmart was about 85 percent of its fiscal 2025 revenue.
• KION, which owns Dematic, grew its automation order intake 39.5 percent in 2025.

Words to know.

• WCS: the warehouse control system that routes cartons and runs diverts.
• AS/RS: an automated storage and retrieval system.
• Goods-to-person: robots or shuttles bring stored items to a fixed picking station.

Joltek’s case study of recovering a warehouse’s tote-lane controls and network shows the controls and network layer in practice.

Transport infrastructure

Distributed · FRA, TSA, FAA, US Coast Guard, FTA, Transport Canada · Documentation 3 · Hazard 4 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 5

Airports, rail and ports.

Baggage. Mishandled bags cost airlines $6,300,000,000 in 2025, at $260 a bag. Federal law requires explosives screening of all checked baggage. In September 2025 a ransomware incident hit Collins Aerospace’s MUSE passenger processing software, used by airlines to share check-in and gates.

Rail.

• Positive train control: federal rules require PTC to prevent four kinds of event, from train-to-train collisions to switches set the wrong way. It ran on all 57,536 required route miles by December 2020.
• Communications-based train control: the current standard is IEEE 1474.1-2025.

Ports. The Long Beach Container Terminal brought the first automated guided vehicles to a US port. East and Gulf Coast longshore workers ratified a contract through 2030 that the union describes as including “full protections against automation”.

Security rules.

• The Coast Guard’s cyber rule requires a cybersecurity plan from covered vessels and facilities by July 16, 2027.
• TSA reissued its rail directives in 2026.

Words to know.

• PTC: positive train control.
• CBTC: radio-based train control.
• Baggage handling system: the conveyors, screening machines and sorters behind check-in.

Commercial buildings and hospitals

Facility · Local building and fire authorities, CMS for hospitals, state energy code agencies · Documentation 2 · Hazard 2 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 2

What it runs. The United States had about 5.9 million commercial buildings in EIA’s 2018 survey, spending $141,000,000,000 a year on energy. About 9,000 are inpatient hospitals, which run 168 hours a week.

The control stack. Building automation runs on BACnet, standardized as ANSI/ASHRAE 135-2024. Niagara, which Tridium says runs in over one million instances, sits across many vendors’ equipment.

The rules.

• Hospitals: federal rules for hospitals still require the 2012 editions of NFPA 101 and NFPA 99.
• Data models: ASHRAE 223P, a semantic data model for buildings, had its first public review in June 2025. It had not been published as of October 2026.

Words to know.

• BACnet: the open building automation protocol.
• Sequence of operation: the written control logic for the building’s equipment.
• VAV box: the terminal unit that varies airflow to a zone.

Agriculture and controlled-environment growing

Hybrid · FDA, USDA, OSHA, CFIA · Documentation 2 · Hazard 3 · Pace 1 · Uptime pressure 3

Scale: the 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 11,465 farms growing greenhouse vegetables and herbs, on 133,379,301 square feet.

How it runs: greenhouse climate computers control vents, screens, heating, lighting and fertigation, from specialists such as Priva. Grain elevators fall under OSHA’s grain handling standard, which requires grain dust over 1/8 inch to be cleared near bucket elevators.

Failures: AppHarvest, which ran large greenhouses, filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and Bowery Farming, a vertical farming company, ceased operations in November 2024.

Words to know.

• Fertigation: dosing nutrients into irrigation water.
• Bucket elevator: the grain lift whose housing is the main dust explosion risk.
• CEA: controlled-environment agriculture.

Entertainment

Discrete · State ride safety agencies, OSHA · Documentation 3 · Hazard 4 · Pace 3 · Uptime pressure 3

Theme parks and theaters automate motion around people instead of products.

Standards: the Entertainment Services and Technology Association publishes ANSI E1 standards for powered hoists, performer flying systems (E1.43-2025) and stage machinery control systems (E1.64-2024).

Vendors: Rockwell offers ride control migrations.

Words to know.

• Interlock: the circuit that stops a ride or hoist until gates and restraints are proven.
• Show control: the system that fires lighting, sound and effects on cue.
• Powered hoist: the electric chain hoist that lifts scenery.

What changes when people move from one industry to another?

The controls skills transfer; the context does not. Someone moving from automotive to food meets hygienic design and tighter records. Pharma adds validation, and chemicals add hazardous areas and safety systems. Data centers swap production lines for facility controls. Most of the learning curve is rules, paperwork and people, not code.

What transfers and what does not

What transfers is in the panel:

• the IEC 61131-3 languages;
• the major PLC and DCS platforms;
• industrial Ethernet, drives and HMIs;
• historians.

What does not transfer is around the panel:

• the rules;
• the records;
• the safety culture;
• the question of who owns the code.

Vladimir’s own path crosses several of these lines:

• capital projects in consumer goods;
• food plant operations and maintenance;
• a greenfield food plant;
• chemical manufacturing and warehousing;
• equipment for pharmaceutical plants.

The practitioners below describe the same pattern from their own moves.

Move	What practitioners report
Automotive to food	Food plants are much cleaner, with stricter production processes, and they always track downtime, waste, and product in and out (r/PLC, December 2024). Another noticed stainless NEMA 4X enclosures with sloped tops, a preference for 4 to 20 milliamp analog sensors, and a hygienic standard for every field device (r/PLC)
Into pharma	Documentation can reach 40 to 60 percent of an automation project (r/PLC, December 2024)
Into oil and gas	Slow, methodical and the most safety-focused, often with a development system that receives plant data but cannot write back (r/PLC, May 2025)
Into snack food	Boilers, packaging machines and automated vehicles under one roof. The machine makers supply the HMI and SCADA, so MES is the main software work (r/PLC, July 2023)
Into food maintenance	OEM machines such as slicers and labelers are black boxes (r/IndustrialMaintenance, October 2024)
Into water	Municipal plants promote operators into entry-level controls roles because it is cheaper than hiring from outside (r/PLC, June 2025)

Eight common moves

The table below draws on the family sections above. It names what to learn first and the trap most likely to catch a newcomer.

From	To	Learn first	The trap
Automotive	Food and beverage	Hygienic design, food safety plans (Part 117, HACCP), allergen changeovers	Treating a washdown rating as a hygiene rating
Food and beverage	Pharma	Part 11, Part 211, the validation lifecycle, Annex 1	Assuming food’s records rules apply. Food safety records are exempt from Part 11; drug records are not
Discrete manufacturing	Chemicals	IEC 61511 and the safety lifecycle, process safety management of change, hazardous areas	Putting safety logic inside the control system
Manufacturing	Data centers	Tier design, the BMS and EPMS split, independent commissioning	Treating a controls change as routine on a site designed to stay up during maintenance
Packaging	Warehousing	The WMS and WCS layers, sorter throughput, ASME B20.1	Tuning one conveyor while the control software sets the throughput
Machine builder	End user	The plant’s own standards, management of change, the whole line	Delivering code the plant cannot maintain
Manufacturing	Water	AWIA risk assessments, telemetry, remote access security	Default passwords on remote PLCs
Manufacturing	Defense supply	CMMC scoping, controlled unclassified information, ITAR	Remote vendor support that becomes a deemed export

Joltek’s guide to the path into automation leadership covers the career side of these moves.

What changes for plants from 2026 to 2028?

Several dated changes reach plants between 2026 and 2028. EU Cyber Resilience Act reporting began September 11, 2026, and the EU Machinery Regulation applies from January 20, 2027. FDA cannot enforce food traceability before July 20, 2028. New NFPA editions, a paused CMMC Phase 2 and Section 232 tariffs add to the list.

The dated changes

Date	Change	Who it reaches	Status
2026-01-15	A 25 percent duty on specified semiconductors and fab equipment	Electronics	In force
2026-01-20	The FSMA food traceability rule’s original compliance date. Public Law 119-37 bars enforcement funding before 2028-07-20	Food	Enforcement barred
2026-02-02	FDA’s Quality Management System Regulation	Medical devices	In force
2026-04-06	Section 232 metals duties apply to the full customs value of the product	Anyone importing metal goods	In force
2026-05-26	NERC CIP-003-11 and the virtualization standards	Power and grid	In force
2026-07-13	CMMC Phase 2, due 2026-11-10, suspended pending review	Defense supply chain	Suspended
2026-07-31 and 2026-09-29	A 100 percent Section 232 duty on patented pharmaceuticals	Pharma	In force
2026-08-12	The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies	Packaging	In force
2026-09-11	Cyber Resilience Act reporting obligations	Makers of products sold in the EU	In force
2026-12-09	Transposition deadline for the revised EU Product Liability Directive	Makers of products sold in the EU	Scheduled
2027-01-20	The EU Machinery Regulation applies	Machine builders selling into the EU	Scheduled
2027-02-18	The EU battery passport	Batteries	Scheduled
Mid-2027	IATF 16949, second edition	Automotive suppliers	Planned
2027-07-16	Coast Guard cybersecurity plans due	Ports and vessels	Scheduled
2027-11-01	Lead and Copper Rule Improvements	Water	Scheduled
2027-11-27	The DSCSA small dispenser exemption ends	Pharma distribution	Scheduled
2027-12-11	Cyber Resilience Act main obligations	Makers of products sold in the EU	Scheduled
2028-07-20	The proposed new FSMA traceability compliance date	Food	Proposed
2028-10-01	NERC CIP-015-1 for control centers	Power and grid	Scheduled

Five more are pending with no date yet:

• CISA’s CIRCIA final rule;
• the in-force order for Canada’s Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act;
• TSA’s permanent pipeline and rail cyber rule;
• EPA’s revision of its Risk Management Program;
• a Section 232 investigation of imports of robotics and industrial machinery, opened in September 2025.

New NFPA editions also land in this window, among them NFPA 70E (2027) and NFPA 86 (2027).

Technology shifts

Four shifts cut across families:

• AI power demand. Data center electricity could reach 325 to 580 TWh by 2028, and PJM’s latest capacity auction finished short of its reliability requirement.
• Autonomy. It is moving from mine haul roads to quarries.
• Open process automation. It got its first certified product in April 2026, and the modular-plant interface reached version 2.0.
• Robots. Worldwide installations grew 11 percent in 2025, to more than 600,000 a year. The United States, up 12 percent, became the second-largest market after China.

Incidents that reached production

Year	Where	What happened	The controls lesson
2005	BP Texas City refinery	A tower overfilled during startup; 15 people died	Independent level indication and alarms, and safe startup procedures
2008	Imperial Sugar, Port Wentworth, Georgia	A sugar dust explosion killed 14 people	Dust control is process safety, even in food
2015	Three Ukrainian distribution companies	Attackers opened breakers remotely; about 225,000 customers lost power	Remote access to control systems is an attack path
2017	An oil refinery in the Middle East	TRITON malware targeted a safety controller, and the refinery shut down for several days	The safety system is a target too
2021	Colonial Pipeline	Ransomware hit the IT network. CISA and the FBI saw no indication that operational networks were directly affected	Separate the networks, and plan how operations continue when IT is down
2021	JBS USA	A cyberattack hit operations in North America and Australia	Plants depend on business systems to schedule and ship
2023	Clorox	Systems were taken offline, operations ran on manual workarounds, and quarterly net sales fell 20 percent	Plan the recovery as carefully as the defense
2025	Jaguar Land Rover	Production halted, with the supply chain heavily affected	One manufacturer’s outage reaches its whole supply chain
2025	Asahi Group	An attacker entered the group network through network equipment at a group site	Edge network devices need the same care as servers
2025	Collins Aerospace MUSE	Ransomware hit a vendor’s shared passenger processing software, which runs outside RTX’s network	A shared vendor system can stop many sites at once
2026	Stryker and Boston Scientific	Cyber incidents disrupted operations and manufacturing	Even validated plants depend on corporate IT

Several of these began on the IT side. Joltek’s guide to segmenting a brownfield plant network covers the control that limits how far an incident reaches.

Where should a plant start, whatever the industry?

Start the same way in any industry: know what is installed, what it depends on and what is at risk. An inventory of controllers, networks and software versions, a list of the rules that apply, and a clear map of who owns each system come first. The industry sets the priorities. The method stays the same.

Five first moves

1. An inventory. Controllers, networks, software versions and what each depends on, including the machines that arrived as black boxes.
2. A rules map. Start from the standards table in this guide and the regulators in the plant’s family section. Then add the customer’s requirements.
3. An ownership map. For each system, who may change it: the plant, the OEM, the integrator or the customer. The fourth lens, made concrete.
4. A risk baseline. Obsolete hardware, single points of failure, undocumented code and remote access paths, ranked by what a failure would cost.
5. Data the plant can trust. One source of truth for counts, states and downtime before any analytics project starts.

Where Joltek fits

Joltek is an independent firm. It does not sell control hardware or software. It assesses what a plant has installed, builds the modernization roadmap and leads the technical work across vendors and integrators.

Its first-hand ground is:

• consumer goods;
• food and beverage;
• chemicals;
• warehousing;
• equipment for pharmaceutical plants.

In the other industries in this guide the method is the same, and the industry’s rules come from the sources cited here. Two places to begin are a plant systems assessment and a modernization roadmap.

Frequently asked questions

Which industries use industrial automation the most?

Measured by new industrial robots, electronics and automotive lead. Of more than 600,000 robots installed worldwide in 2025, electronics took 24 percent and automotive 23 percent, according to the International Federation of Robotics. In the United States, automotive took about 35 percent. Refining, chemicals and power are just as automated, but with process control systems rather than robots.

What is the difference between process and discrete manufacturing?

Process manufacturing makes product from formulas and recipes, in batches or continuously, as in chemicals, food or refining. Discrete manufacturing assembles countable units from a bill of materials, as in cars or electronics. Many plants are hybrid: a dairy pasteurizes milk as a continuous process, then fills cartons on a discrete packaging line.

Why do some industries use a DCS and others PLCs?

A DCS suits large continuous or batch processes with thousands of control loops, tight operator integration and a separate safety system, as in refining, chemicals and power. PLCs suit fast machine and line control, as in packaging, automotive and warehousing. The line has blurred: PLC-based process systems now run mineral plants and refrigeration, and DCS vendors sell batch control.

Which standards apply to industrial automation in every industry?

A core set appears almost everywhere: IEC 61131-3 for PLC programming, ISA-95 for the levels from sensor to ERP, NFPA 79 and UL 508A for machine and panel wiring in North America, ISO 13849-1 for machine safety and ISA/IEC 62443 for security. Process plants add IEC 61511 for safety systems and hazardous-area codes, and each regulator adds its own rules.

Which companies are the largest industrial automation suppliers?

By the revenue their automation businesses report, the largest include Siemens Digital Industries, Emerson, Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, ABB, Mitsubishi Electric and Schneider Electric. Segment definitions differ, so these figures measure company size, not market share. No public source publishes automation market share by industry.

Can automation engineers move between industries?

Yes. The controllers, networks and programming languages are largely the same, so the technical skills transfer. What has to be learned is each industry’s rules, documentation and culture: hygienic design in food, validation in pharma, safety systems in chemicals, outage windows in mining and utilities. Practitioners who have moved say the controls side is basically the same.

Same controls, different rules

Compared industry by industry, industrial automation differs far less in its hardware than in its rules. The PLC in a dairy, the DCS in a refinery and the controller on a data center chiller are closer relatives than their industries suggest. For anyone who works across plants, that is mostly good news: most of what they know transfers.

It is also where projects go wrong. The failures that hurt most in a new industry rarely start in the code. They tend to start in one of four places:

• a rule nobody read;
• a validation step nobody planned;
• a safety system treated as part of the control system;
• a machine whose code belongs to someone else.

Before changing anything in an unfamiliar plant, read it through the four lenses: how the product is made, who regulates it, what a failure costs, and who owns the machines. The explorer puts all 39 industries side by side, and each family section names the standards and suppliers that matter there.

That is the ground Joltek works on with plants:

• assessing what is installed;
• mapping the rules that apply;
• sequencing modernization so production keeps running.

A free modernization consultation is the simplest place to start.

Photos: control room photo by Simon Mannweiler, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped, resized and with a chair logo removed, and this adapted version is shared under the same license. Other photos by Homa Appliances (Unsplash) and BI ravencrow (Pexels).