Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
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I am moderating an exciting session at the 2025 ARC Forum, entitled “Executive Views of Open Automation”. The session will feature leaders from two companies that have been at the forefront of the revolution in industrial automation: Audi and ExxonMobil.
ExxonMobil operates dozens of facilities and hundreds of process units around the globe. Its traditional automation strategy has been to focus investments on higher level automation applications such as model predictive control and online optimization. Its analysis was that investments in the lower layers of automation (DCS for example) were not financially attractive, besides being disruptive to operations and difficult to execute.
To escape this dilemma ExxonMobil presented its automation suppliers with a new set of visionary requirements, even though these requirements were at a stage when no supplier could possibly deliver them. That vision grew into the Open Process Automation Forum and this year, ExxonMobil has placed its first full-sized open automation system online in one of its US plants.
Whit McConnell is Chief Engineer, Automation & Process Control at ExxonMobil. In this role he is responsible for setting the direction of process automation throughout ExxonMobil, and Whit will speak at this session to explain ExxonMobil’s plans and to answer our questions.
On the discrete manufacturing side, the one company that has pushed the envelope of automation technology far more than any other is the automotive manufacturer Audi. In its largest plants Audi deploys thousands of IPCs, PLCs, robots, and other automation devices. Many of these require local service and some of which are not even networked. The company’s ever-expanding requirements for software upgrades, cyber security protection, and application enhancement all had to be performed during non-production hours, and this was becoming simply impossible.
Henning Löser is the Senior Manager of the Audi Production Lab. In this role, Henning leads a team that develops new technologies for deployment in Audi production plants. With its supplier partners Audi has pioneered the technology of control and HMI virtualization and containerization and invested in this technology at an early stage when most industry folks believed it was either impractical or impossible. Henning will share the stage with Witt McConnell and will explain Audi’s experience and the future direction in automation. He will also answer our questions.
This session at the ARC Industry Leadership Forum will take place on February 12, 2025, in Orlando. It is just one of the many valuable sessions taking place at the event—February 10-13, 2025, entitled “Winning in the Industrial AI Era”.
Please join us at the event!
Register here for the 2025 ARC Industry Leadership Forum: https://www.arcweb.com/events/arc-industry-leadership-forum-orlando