Rockwell aspires to be paramount aggregator of plant-floor data
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Rockwell Automation doesn't need to talk to its customers—although it no doubt does—to know that when it comes to information technology (IT), manufacturing plants remain "a highly fragmented space."
The company is embarking on an ERP implementation, and in preparation, says Kevin Roach, VP of Rockwell Software, the vendor audited its own IT usage. "In its 80-some plants, Rockwell has about 500 applications and 600 interfaces," claims Roach.
The "gap" responsible for this raging heterogeneity is that between the front office and the plant floor.
"ERP systems are standard, and they work," says Roach. "Beneath that, though, you have many loosely coupled intermediate systems, which—if you include dissemination of product information—constitute an $8-billion market. The redundancy in that space hampers productivity."
The occasion for Roach's remarks was a discussion about a recently announced redefinition of Rockwell Software's FactoryTalk production management and performance suite, including the following:
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Extending its plant-floor execution offering;
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Deploying a service-oriented architecture (SOA); and
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Bringing the company's software product offerings into a single integrated suite—aka FactoryTalk—as well as possible development of new solutions or application acquisitions.
One major benefit of an SOA-based integrated suite, says Roach, is "the ability to use objects created in one application across multiple applications," based on a common set of software services that includes security, diagnostics, auditing, data model, licensing, real-time data, historical data, configuration, and alarms & events.
This effort represents an investment on the part of Rockwell of "hundreds of millions of dollars," says Roach, and one that addresses the problem of disparate plant-floor solutions.
In the past, it's been said that Rockwell did a poor job at third-party integration. "But what's needed to solve what really is an industry problem," says Roach, "is domain expertise, and Rockwell has a $25-billion installed base. The unified plant model that we are creating will put data into a context that spans control and information management. We will have the ability to map data from other systems into our model, where it can be handled as if it were native to the system. Performance will be better, based on this model, than if we remain dependent on interoperability standards that aren't there yet. And you have to remember that we're moving metal, so safety and security are paramount."
Roach says the company will work with complementary third-party software companies in much the same way it does with partners at the control-system layer. He also says connectivity to non-Rockwell Automation control systems will become more robust in the future, though there will be "premier integration" with the Rockwell Logix control platform.
Roach joined Rockwell about one year ago from GE, where he was VP of GE Fanuc Global Solutions. And, though he would surely deny sole responsibility, the redefinition of FactoryTalk might be seen as one of the first major fruits of his move.
In comparing the cultures of the two automation giants, GE and Rockwell, Roach refers to Rockwell as "a much larger, smaller company"—i.e., Rockwell, while much smaller than GE, has the scale to make needed investments, but also, by being focused solely on automation, the focus and domain expertise needed to compete.
