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At this year’s ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Tom O'Reilly, Vice President, Global Business Development at Rockwell Automation, spoke to ARC’s Craig Resnick, Vice President Consulting, during the ARC Industry Forum in Orlando. Tom discussed with Craig his perspectives on Rockwell Automation’s role in helping its customers progress with their digital transformation journey as well as some of the success stories. You can watch the full video here and/or on YouTube.
Tom mentioned that, “This year, we really started to see a take-up, as people are getting to scale in their digital transformations. And, we've had a lot of proof of concepts for maybe the past couple of years, year and a half, and we see people going to really scale them up.”
One of the examples Tom mentioned was about Lonza, a large pharmaceutical company based out of Switzerland. Earlier in 2019, the company gave Rockwell Automation a $13 million order that was scaled for nine facilities, and the solutions included Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk InnovationSuite with MES, which is the traditional PharmaSuite MES, including an IoT platform and analytics, for all nine facilities.
Another example of digital transformation Tom mentioned is Fonterra in New Zealand. This company started off implementing advanced process control, then included MES, and now is adding analytics and an IOT platform at all of their facilities.
According to Tom, “Fonterra is calling it electric milk. The company is actually decentralizing and focusing on individual hot water requirements, heat pumps and smaller scale boilers, as opposed to large scale boilers, to reduce energy consumption—we expect that this will continue to happen. “
IT/OT convergence is important
How does Rockwell Automation help its customers on the IT side as it has helped its customers for many years on the OT side?
“We're well known on the OT side”, according to Tom. “But we've been talking about IT/OT convergence for a while with our customers—having many conversations. The partnership with Cisco and developing the Ethernet infrastructure, including the Stratix switches, started to get us talking to IT a lot more. Then as we've built out our software offerings, the FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, our partnerships with PTC, Microsoft, and the newly announced one with ANSYS, that's all getting us greater traction in the IT area. But it's a journey.”
What is Rockwell Automation's philosophy on partnerships and ecosystems?
Tom stated that, “Partnering is in our DNA, so we've always been very good at partnering. We have a long history of partnering. The feedback from our partners is very good. We call it our partner network. We have things like the Encompass program, which is an extension of our integrated architecture for our automation systems. That's been in place 20 years. We have some very strong strategic alliances with Microsoft, Cisco, and FANUC. And actually, one of the things we're doing a little differently, which we announced at Automation Fair, is our new digital partnering program, which is specifically around the software space, both relative to the IoT platform, analytics, and higher-level software. But also, you'll be seeing some things this year around the whole digital engineering thread.”
Based on a combination of global economic headwinds and tailwinds, how can Rockwell Automation accelerate its growth further?
Tom O’Reilly addressed this by stating, “Let me talk about the tailwinds first. This ARC conference, I mean, digital transformation is top of mind, with every manufacturer. It's really driving a lot opportunities. You've seen that we publicly report every quarter on our info solutions and our connected services business. It's consistently been growing double digits, even in a softening economy. That is, I'd say, the biggest tailwind that helps our business.”
“Headwinds, well, that's the economy. GDPs and industrial productivity have slowed, so it's going to be going more of a slow growth environment, and then you have things like the coronavirus, which will impact the business in China, and we'll have to see what happens there.”
Concluding the interview, Craig Resnick agreed that Rockwell Automation had made substantial progress over the past year helping its customers with their digital transformation journey and looks forward to following the company’s progress moving forward.