IN Brief:
- LAPP will exhibit at Drives & Controls 2026 at the NEC Birmingham on 3–4 June.
- The company will present industrial connectivity, modular connectors, harnessing, cable systems, and smart-factory support.
- EMC, OT security, and reliable machine communication are becoming harder as industrial systems add faster drives, sensors, and networked controls.
LAPP will present industrial connectivity, cabling, connector, and automation infrastructure at Drives & Controls 2026, taking place at the NEC Birmingham on 3–4 June.
The company will exhibit on stand E30 with products and services for automation, intralogistics, energy, mobility, and machine engineering. Its display will cover industrial communication, smart-factory cabling, modular connectors, harnessing, and support for integrated machine and plant projects.
LAPP will also take part in the show’s Connected Production Stage programme. Matt Ansell, product portfolio manager, and Elliot Hoole, cluster leader project business, will deliver a session on electromagnetic compatibility challenges in production environments and the measures used to avoid them.
EMC has become a larger design constraint as factories add faster drives, denser control cabinets, higher data rates, and more connected field devices. Frequency converters, compact electronic assemblies, and lower-energy data signalling can all increase susceptibility to interference when cabling, shielding, grounding, and connector selection are not treated as part of the system architecture.
Industrial connectivity is often discussed as infrastructure, but it now carries much of the practical reliability burden in automated machinery. Power, data, sensing, motion, safety, and diagnostics are increasingly routed through dense physical installations. Cable construction, shield termination, connector robustness, strain relief, bend radius, and harness quality can determine whether a machine remains stable once commissioned.
Deterministic Ethernet parts such as NXP’s RT1180 MCUs bringing TSN to industrial control designs raise the value of reliable physical infrastructure. Low-jitter control traffic and time-sensitive networking depend on an installation that can withstand electrical noise, movement, vibration, and poor routing practice.
OT security adds another layer to the problem. Secure industrial systems need more than policy, authentication, and monitoring software; they require maintainable, well-documented physical infrastructure. Poorly labelled cabling, ad-hoc changes, and inaccessible harnessing make faults harder to trace and can undermine the discipline required for secure, repeatable plant operation.
For machine builders, the cost of getting connectivity wrong often appears late. EMC instability, intermittent communications faults, and connector failures can emerge during commissioning or after the equipment has moved into production. At that point, corrective work is slower and more expensive than designing the cabling and connection architecture properly at the start.
LAPP’s focus at Drives & Controls reflects that change in emphasis. As smart factories add more sensing, faster communications, and tighter integration between IT and OT systems, cabling and connectors are becoming part of the electronics design conversation. The physical layer is no longer a passive commodity; it is where many reliability, EMC, and maintainability decisions are made.
